New Processors to Only Support Windows 10

hardware, Office IT, ,
01
Mar 2016

windows-10-hero-official-wallpaper-

Many people have resisted migrating from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10, but Microsoft has now announced that new processors will only run on Windows 10.

You might have noticed, last summer, that windows were popping up on your PC encouraging you to switch to Microsoft’s latest operating system (OS) – Windows 10. However, a high percentage of users avoided hitting the ‘INSTALL’ button.

You see, Windows 8 was somewhat of a disaster for Microsoft, both technically and aesthetically. As a result, consumers were reticent to take up Microsoft’s offer of a free upgrade as they had no idea what would be waiting for them.

These fears were further compounded when story after story emerged of issues with Windows 10 e.g. security flaws and Microsoft actively forcing installs onto users’ systems. As I’m sure you’ll agree, though, progress is always necessary, so you were probably going to give in at some point.

Microsoft has decided to try and force your hand a little sooner with their announcement that new processors will only be compatible with Windows 10, so let’s take a look at what this means for you and your business.

What Exactly Has Microsoft Announced?

Microsoft is keen for the latest processors being designed to use the most up to date Windows OS. This means that new processors released by AMD, Intel and Qualcomm will only work on PCs running Windows 10. If you’re running an old OS, they simply won’t work. And when Windows 11 comes around, the exact same procedure will be put in place.

Why is Microsoft Making This Policy Change?

Windows-10-Free-Upgrade-Windows-10-Free-Insider-Program-Windows-10-how-Can-Upgrade-How-to-Upgrade-Windows-10-586338

Upgrading previous versions of Windows always had a financial pinch for consumers, but Windows 10 is completely free. This is all part of Microsoft’s plan to market Windows 10 as a service rather than a costly product.

Microsoft wants everyone to adopt it, so ensuring that Windows 10 is essential for new processors means there will be no choice but to upgrade.

It’s also a move which will keep hardware developers for Microsoft happy as they will no longer have to outlay huge amounts of cash on making their processors backwards compatible.

Does This Mean You Have to Upgrade Immediately?

Microsoft-Upgrade-Your-World-Windows-10-600x360-600x330

You might be concerned that Windows is forcing you to not only upgrade to Windows 10, but also to upgrade to one of the new processors. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Windows 7 and 8.1 will still receive essential security and application updates for several years, so, as long as your hardware stays the same, your OS will remain supported.

However, remaining on an ‘antiquated’ OS is not the best way for your business to stay competitive and work to its full potential. That’s why it seems as though it’s only going to get harder and harder to resist the upgrade to Windows 10.

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals.

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What to do when your printer stops working

hardware, Office IT,
28
Jun 2015

The-Humanity-of-Printing

Do you know what to do when your printer stops working? If not, we’ll help you take out some of the guesswork with some basic troubleshooting tips.

Printers may be an understated piece of equipment. It almost becomes part of the office furniture, until it gets used for printing.  But what happens when the office printer stops working, what is one to do before they decide to call for help?  Firstly, remain calm. The good news is that we’ve pieced together a checklist for what to do when a printer stops working.

What to check before first

Just a preliminary note: It may sound obvious; however, most printers can actually display the problem on their LCD displays or give clues as to what the problem is. Make a note of any errors which may flash on this display too.

  • Restart the printer. Simply power off and then switch it back on. Sometimes all that is needed for a printer to work well again is a simple restart. This often does the trick, almost works like magic!
  • Clear the printer’s sprint queue. This is a common problem where one print job within the print queue jams up all other print jobs waiting for their turn to print in the queue. To clear the queue, simply head over to the printer’s setting from your computer’s Control Panel on Windows 7 or 8 by going to

Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound> Printers
Double click the printer that has the problem.
A print queue should be available, and from there you can delete and clear the print jobs to tell it to stop printing. Click Cancel to remove the print jobs.

Try to send a new print job to test its working fine.

  • Make sure your printer has enough supplies. By this we mean enough paper to feed through it and plenty of ink to use. Insufficient levels of these can make a printer unhappy, so be sure to not overlook this!

Paper Jams- a common problem

paper-jam

Printers are usually good at telling their users when there’s a paper jam. If there is one, it’s a good idea to check that paper isn’t stuck. Even the smallest piece of paper jammed in the printer’s rollers qualifies as a paper jam.

Sometimes a printer will complain about a phantom paper jam. In this case, it’s a matter of checking there’s enough paper in the paper tray and all trays or doors are closed shut.

Servicing your printer

The inside of a typical laser printer from Zinetic.

Diagram of the inside of a typical laser printer from Zinetic.

Laser jet printers need servicing from time to time, so it’s always a good idea to have it serviced. Once a certain amount of printing threshold has been reached, the printer may request a service to replace one of its components from wear and tear such as a print drum or paper roller, helping to further extend the printer’s life.

Check the warranty

It’s always a good idea to register your printer for its warranty as soon as it arrives in the office. You’ll want the least amount of trouble by having your warranty activated which will cover you for a faulty printer and have the problem fixed promptly by the vendor.

For more ways to troubleshoot your printers and computers, contact your local IT professionals.

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The Declining Firefox Market Share

Office IT,
02
May 2015

chrome_vs_firefox_securos.org_.ua_

Is Firefox as popular as it used to be? A decline in the Firefox market share has proven its loss of user share. Learn why by reading our overview here.

Browsers take long-term data statistics very seriously, as it is a measure of their success in the internet browser market. The popular and widely used browsers today are considered to be Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

In the past year, Mozilla Firefox’s desktop user share has dropped by a significant 34% and since April 2010, dropped down to a total of 54%.

In recent months and years, Mozilla’s Firefox has continued to lose user share due to other widely used internet browsers gaining popularity. The Firefox browser has dropped to the lowest numbers in the browser market share since its initial release back in 2004 when Internet Explorer had already captured most of browser market.

Less people are using the Firefox browser and they’re increasingly reporting issues related to its use. For instance, there are now fewer browser users discussing bugs and fixes on blogs and forums than ever before. This has led to more problems for Mozilla Firefox.

The rise and fall of user share

browser-war-galit-weisberg

Browser wars as depicted by Galit Weisberg.

 

Let’s look at the rise and fall of user share regarding Mozilla Firefox browser and compare it to other popular browsers.

February saw Mozilla Firefox’s user share on desktop platforms to be down to 18.2%, which was down half a percentage from the previous month.

According to Computerworld, if the trend of losing market share continues at the same rate, this could mean that Firefox would go under 8% by this coming October based on both mobile and desktop users being at a low 9.8%, which is 3.4% down from when they first recorded statistics in July 2014.

Mobile Device Browsers

web-browsers

Since the introduction of smartphones that have been made widely available to the consumer market, users are also accessing the internet on their mobile devices. The drop in user share for Firefox appears to correlate with the increased use of mobile devices. Not even their combined numbers of desktop and mobile device users can make up for this loss in market share.

This is despite having a mobile web browser available on smartphone devices, such as for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android devices.

According to Computerworld’s records, February’s mobile share usage was less than seven-tenths of 1%.  Google’s Chrome browser has been the biggest beneficiary of the loss of user share suffered by Firefox.

With Chrome being a popular browser choice on mobile platforms, this has helped their share flourish on the overall market. According to Net Applications’ statistics, Chrome along with the former Android browsers it has replaced, takes up a massive share of the market with 41.5%.

Mozilla committed to evolve their services

As Mozilla is focusing on their cloud service to offer an improved browsing experience for mobile and desktop browser users. They have also signed a five year contract with Yahoo to make its search engine a default one for Firefox browser in the United States.

In regards to a snapshot of the current market share for browsers, the order of popularity from highest to lowest includes Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

For more information on Cloud services and flexible IT solutions, contact your local IT professionals.

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What Are Your 3 Office Printing Options?

Office IT, ,
14
Apr 2015

Printing

It is essential to have a working printer in an office of any size. Here are 3 ways to connect printers as well as their advantages and disadvantages.

Depending on how many staff you have working at your office and the printing requirements needed, you’ll want the most efficient setup available for them. Below are 3 office printing options for you to consider:

1 – Local printer shared over a networkPrinters-HP-OJ-4500-DESKTOP-ALL-IN-ONE-PRINTER-1

Advantages–

  • Local printers are relatively cheap to purchase, prices can vary, however the cheapest you can buy new can range from $35-40 or more.
  • They are very straightforward to set up.
  • They fit easily onto a desktop.
  • Suitable for a small team or office to use.

Disadvantages–

  • In order for the shared printer to work, the computer hosting the device needs to be online over the network so that other users can print to it.
  • Not suitable for large offices, where hundreds of print jobs need to be processed daily.
  • Most cheap desktop printers that are set up as a shared printer tend to print slower, producing less printed pages per minute than, say, a heavy duty laser jet printer.

2 – Network printer connected over Wi-Fi

Dell wireless printer-p713w-1

Advantages-

  • Moderately priced, prices can range from $100 upwards for a cheaper end laser jet printer.
  • As long as the printer is connected and online, everyone can use the printer.
  • Suitable for medium to large offices who need access to a heavy duty printer such as a laser jet.

Disadvantages-

  • A little more complicated to set up, this usually requires an IT administrator to configure.
  • This setup depends heavily on a wireless connection; therefore the quality of Wi-Fi is essential for this to work efficiently.
  • The distance between the printer to the router is also essential. The bigger the distance, the weaker the connection will be. For instance, the router being too far away from the printer could mean lack of Wi-Fi signal for there to even be a connection. You’ll also need to assess anything that may disrupt Wi-Fi signals, such as the use of microwaves in eating areas nearby.

 

3-Hard wired network printer connected with Ethernet26754_00_1000x1000

 

Advantages-

  • Like the Wi-Fi printers, hard wired network ones that are able to connect via Ethernet are also moderately priced.
  • Suitable for medium to large offices that also require a heavy duty printer or even a multi-functional one with scanning capabilities.
  • A more stable connection compared to Wi-Fi, making it the most reliable solution of them all as far as shared network printing goes.
  • Anyone on the network can connect to the printer without having to rely on it being on a single PC.

Disadvantages-

  • The inevitable use of cables, but can be tidied away with a cable tidy accessory.
  • Even Ethernet printers need to be set up by an IT administrator to allow it to reside on the network and make it available for all to use.
  • As this setup will likely use a heavy duty printer, it’ll also need its own space in the office.

As you can see, the best solution for a small office (or even for a home-based office) is to have a local printer shared over the network. On the other hand, if reliable is important for users at all times within a medium to large sized office, a hard-wired network printer is a much better choice.

For more ways to optimize your printer network setup or network infrastructure, contact your local IT professionals.

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What is RAID and Should Your Business be Using it?

hardware, Office IT,
02
Apr 2015

What_Is_RAID

Find out what RAID is and whether your critical business systems need it. Learn all the basics to ensure your data stays secured regardless of your set-up.

RAID is short for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”. The “I” in RAID can also be referred to as “Inexpensive”, which can also be true.

RAID stores your data across multiple hard disks for the benefit of:

Providing faster volume– Quicker to access data

Facilitates redundancy– Allowing seamless data access when a given number of disks fail.

In other words it helps prevent data loss when a hard drive fails by allowing the other hard drives to pick up the slack

One thing to bear in mind is that RAID data redundancy configurations are not immune to malware attacks, natural disasters and data beaches. As mentioned before, what it’s good for is preventing against hardware failure and maintaining uptime.

Popular RAID levels

Different_RAID_Configurations

RAID levels refer to how hard disks are configured to work alongside each other. There are three common RAID configurations that you’ll mostly hear about:

  • RAID 0- offers the benefit of fast access to read and write data by having it distributed across the disks. The main disadvantage is that it offers no protection when a drive in this arrangement fails, as it’ll be the missing piece that jeopardises this arrangement leading to unreadable data.
  • RAID 1– Mirrors the data in drives paired together. This offers better failover protections. In the case of one drive failing the data would still be available on the other disk whilst the failed drive is replaced. It also comes with the disadvantage of using up half of the disk space that is used to hold the mirrored data from the other disk. This means it’s a more costly solution.
  • RAID 5– provides the best of both worlds, with data redundancy and faster access to it. It distributes data across all disks like with a RAID 0 setup and covers data with parity. In the case of failover, it’ll recover data like it does with RAID1. You’ll need to consider the minimum number of disks required for this setup, which is three, and uses one third of the disk capacity to hold the disk parity information.
  • JBOD– Stands for “just a bunch of disks”. It’s not really considered to be a RAID however it is available alongside other RAIDs as a choice on most varieties of storage boxes. This only bunches a group of disks into one volume, where data will be filled until it becomes full and then moves onto the next available disk. With this, there’s isn’t any benefit of faster data access and redundancy. This is only good to use as a last resort.

What is RAID suitable for?

RAID is not really suitable for standard desktop computers, unless there’s a reason to store hundreds of gigabytes worth of critical data. Instead, it’s better suited on all servers and NAS (network attached storage) devices that share content and resources or that hold large amounts of data.

NAS devices simply act as additional storage that can be plugged into a network.

Since managing storage volumes on servers and NAS devices can seem like a headache to maintain, we suggest using an automated RAID management system such as SHR.

SHR by Synology, stands for Synology Hybrid RAID. It’s not even essential to know about all types of RAID setups as SHR takes care to quickly configure storage volume and deploy it according to your requirements.  Unlike the classic RAID setups, SHR allows anyone to maximize their disk usage. There’s a lot more flexibility too, where you can scale up with additional disks within an already configured volume.

For more ways to secure your data and systems, contact your local IT professionals.

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