Computer News
The fastest disaster recovery ever
Are you ready for a disaster? What happens if your server room is flooded or the whole building goes on fire. A good offsite backup can mean your company not crashing just because your server did. TekBusters have good offsite backups and now we have a great one.
We can offer a backup to suit your needs, from simple set it and forget it that backup a few important files regularly to ones that run nightly, weekly or twice a day to store your files in a secure offsite location.
A great backup though? We can now offer the best of both worlds, onsite and offsite backup. We place a backup server on your site that we back up everything to and it in turn backs it up to a secure offsite location. Deleted a large file by accident, it’s on your local backup server, no need to wait. Lost the office? Everything is in storage offsite and can be restored quickly.
What makes this one stand out it the image based backup. With images of your important servers, if they crash we can spin up an image in a virtual machine within minutes. Your whole server just exploded after some one spilled gasoline in it? We just spin up an image and you are back working in minutes like nothing ever happened. Except for that smell of burnt server of course.
If the whole office disappears then we can spin these virtual servers up online and you can work from the cloud. So you keep working while we get new hardware and get your server restored.
It’s not just recovering from disaster, it’s keeping working through it all with full access to your data. That’s the difference between a good backup and a great backup.
Posted in Computer News, Computer Support | 
Tags: backups, bare metal recovery, image backups, virtual server | 
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Google Plus
Yet another addition to the Social Media experience Google+ is now in a trial (a rather big trial, they have 25 million users already). Is it the new facebook? Or Twitter?
It seems to be both. From a quick update (twitter or facebook) to sharing a longer post (blog) or video (youtube and then shared with facebook) or keeping track of business associates (linkedin) it seems to do it all. With the idea of circles you can put people in groups and easily decide who you want to share with. So the video of your kids first steps might be family and friends but the news that your company is launching a new product might be customers and suppliers.
Although there’s no business pages yet, it is definitely under way and with a 25 million user base already, it’s going to be an important one to watch.
2 new phone scams
Getting found on Google
Now that you have a website, are people using it? SEO (Search Engine Optimizaton) is the process of making your website not only human friendly but search engine friendly. This is making sure that when a search engine (like Google, Yahoo, Bin, AltaVista) check your site and index it they know what it is. The next step is getting to the top of the results page.
So if you are a plumber in Surrey you have to ask yourself, does Google know this? Suppose you are the best realtor in White Rock, does Bing know. SEO is the process of making sure they do so that everyone else does.
A simple test, suppose John, newly arrived from Manitoba to Surrey buys a house and one of his pipes start leaking. He needs a plumber fast, so he types’ plumber in Surrey’ into Google. Who do you think he will call? Some one in the first page. Research tells us that most likely he will call one of the first three results. If you’re a plumber and your website comes up on page 17, your website is no good for you. Sorry, no one will call.
More and more people search on the internet for goods and services and if your business is not being found then customers are going elsewhere. If you think your website could work harder for you (or you have no website and would like a hardworking one to start with), give TekBusters a call and we can help
Posted in Computer News, Computer Support, SEO | Tags: Search Engine Optimizion, SEM, SEO | No Comments »
Updating to AVG 2011
The latest AVG is out now and if you’ve been using this anti virus software we do recommend you upgrade it to the newest version. As always it is very important to have the latest anti virus installed and to make sure that it has all it’s updates. New viruses appear daily and a good anti virus is very important.
If you’re not using AVG you can check it out with a free version for home users at http://free.avg.com
If you are using AVG already here’s a quick guide to the update (this is for the free version)
First open AVG and click on the Get it now button on the ad at the bottom of the screen. If you are using the free version, click on the get Update Free Protection. Download and run the update. Again you will need to choose to use the Free Version.
Accept the next two screens with license number and for Quick Install. This will run for a few minutes or more as it downloads updates and installs.
Next it will ask you if you want to install the AVG security toolbar and set Yahoo as your home page. At the moment we recommend unticking both of these boxes. You should keep your homepage at whatever you like (and we do hope it’s the TekBusters website) and the AVG security toolbar has had some issues with browsers slowing down the computer.
Then let is continue to install, accepting all the defaults. If you do get an error, just restart your computer and try again and it will work.
We’re on Facebook
We’re getting round to being everywhere. From White Rock to Surrey, Richmond to Langley and now on Facebook. Come find us there.
Now is the time to order that new computer
Some of the big computer manufacturers are having sales at the moment. It happens every year in July and August. Lots of businesses have people off on vacation so they dont buy much new IT equipment and the manufacturers need to sell something to keep going. So they have a sale. You can save anywhere from 10 – 50% off regular prices depending on the system, but this wont last long. In September businesses will be back with a vengence, catching up on all those shelved projects so the prices will go back up. If you’d like some help why not give us a call, or you can try the Dell PC Advisor Tool which can help you pick the computer that’s right for you.
Reducing TCO
Thanks to all those at Lou’s networking breakfast for listening this morning.
TCO is Total Cost of Ownership and includes the cost of buying a computer and software and also maintaining it. Getting TekBusters out to fix it, and loss of productivity while it’s down all adds up and this is what TCO is. So here are some things to do to minimise TCO.
1. Get a business PC. There is a difference between business and home PCs. Business PCs are better designed and better up to the job of being used 40 hours a week. Also they have less ‘extras’ installed to slow down your PC and cause problems. It does cost more initially but in the end will cause you less trouble and reduce TCO. Usually a business PC will come with a business operating system installed, so Windows 7 Pro or XP Pro, not Home.
2. Pick your software. When you buy a PC you can get with it OEM software. This is a special licence only available with a new PC and usually about half the price of a regular license. The drawback is if you replace your PC you cannot transfer the software. If though you expect your PC to last 3 years then you can move to the newer version of the software anyway.
Also there is a lot of free software out there, I’ve listed some of them in this blog, click here to see.
3. Keep away viruses. You have to have anti virus. There is no way around it and no excuse since there are so many freely available (check the free software link above) and now Microsoft have released on called Microsoft Security Essentials as well. It’s not a bad idea to occasionally do an extra scan for malware and we recommend Malware Bytes for this.
4. Maintenance. Once every 1 – 2 months you should defragment your hard drive. Again I’ve posted about this before, so click here to see how. Also cleaning off the vents on your computer when they get dusty is necessary. Cans of compressed air are available at most electronics stores.
5. Remember to backup. I’ve discussed this here.
6. Picking the right printer can be important if you print a lot. Laser can save you a lot of money. Click here for more information.
Dell Channel Partner
TekBusters is pleased to announce that we’ve furthered our relationship with Dell and are now Registered partners. One of the advantages of this is we can now offer the Dell PC Advisor Tool. Just click on the logo below and you can get a very simple step by step guide to choosing the right Dell PC for you. TekBusters will get a copy so we can help you review this, and help with ordering it and setting it all up.
Dell offers a great service with customisable PCs and excellent warranty and customer support. And with TekBusters we’ll not just deliver it to your door, we can set it up, get it on your network and transfer over your old emails and files.
