NowITWorks.net

“The temp accidentally deleted a file – can I get it back?”

A networking associate called the Now IT Works help desk one morning with that very question. He had a temporary employee in the office who was doing some clerical work when she accidentally deleted a file from the public folders.

How Now IT Works Was Able to Help

As it turns out, the temp didn’t delete the folder but simply dragged-and-dropped it into another folder on the public drive. Now IT Works can help you set high-level safeguards so that only certain employees are able to make changes, add or delete files to existing folders.

Also, your Windows-based server has the ability to monitor critical folders and log entries with the date, time and name of the employee who made the changes.

Clients who subscribe to our Blue Steel service can have this feature activated easily.

Our help desk received a call one morning  from a prospective customer who was in a panic. He had just sent out a very important email from his phone, to a client and received a bounce-back notice that the email had not been delivered. When he got to the office, he learned that no one had access to Outlook so he called Now IT Works. 

As it turns out:

As a Now IT Works client, your servers are being monitored on many levels:

Last week, we had a customer inquire about an e-fax system, which is an online faxing service that processes faxes online and converts them into  email messages. In this case, it would allow all six of their offices to direct faxes to one main online location, but still be separated by office. With the large amount of faxing, both in and out, each day, this solution makes perfect sense.

Some advantages to online faxing include; an end to paper jams, and buying ink, no bulky machine and the ability to fax from just about anywhere.

E-faxing not only increases the speed and ease of faxing but it’s better for the environment than traditional faxing practices!

Do you think an e-fax solution would work for your company? Email info@nowitworks.com for more information on this and other money saving products for your business.

Covering geek-dom through the years – from when it wasn’t cool to be a geek all the way to the present where Facebook and Twitter rule. From the Woz to Zuckerberg, read through the full article/slide show for the evolution of how being a geek finally became cool.

A Brief History of Geeks – PC World

When most computer users hear something about a “worm”, they know it’s not a good thing. Wiki defines a computer worm as “a self-replicating computer program.” It works its way through the computers on your network, without need to attach to a program, like a virus.

But Mark Taylor got a computer worm of another kind – an actual earth worm that got into his laptop and got tangled in the fan, causing the fan to jam and break down. Gross.

Click here to view the full story – Worm Causes Computer to Crash

(Source: Geeks Are Sexy)

As anyone with an email account knows, everyday you receive emails about getting a check from Bill Gates if you forward the email on, job offers that pay high but only require US citizenship and a computer or someone in Nigeria (maybe even a relative!) who just needs a little help to make you super rich.

And just when you thought everyone was aware and cautious of these scams – this lady blew almost $400,000 trying to prove a point. The first instinct it to feel bad for her but when she was advised to stop, she became obsessed with getting paid. Plus, she probably ruined her marriage or at least did some irreparable harm in the process.

Common sense should tell you – be very weary of anything that seems to good to be true, especially via email. And don’t let your pride get the best of your bank account or you’ll end up like Janella – now unable to retire.

A customer contacted our help desk line early one morning with a frantic message about their server’s hard drive, red lights and error message…

When we checked out their problem ’server’ (which wasn’t really a server at all, more on that later) there were two hard drives that were mirroring each other – so when someone saved a file, it was saved on both drives. The reason for this is if one drive fails, the other drive can take over.

In this case, the ‘mirror’ was broken – no one knew what the problem was, only that the problem existed. Unfortunately, this problem had been happening for days.

There were no notification messages, no proactive emails and no on on staff trained to look for this problem.

If they had subscribed to Now IT Works “PC Crash Protection” tool, an email would have been sent out the first time this error occurred so our help desk could have contacted them and dispatched a technician. Even after this warning event, the customer did not chose to sign up for PC Crash Protection. We are unable and unwilling to service customers who do not see the need for this valuable tool. It is even more unfortunate because this customer has 3 servers and 50 computers – without any protection or properly trained staff.

*** Tech Note: A server can mean two different things – a physical server or a software server. For instance, if you have a file server in your office, it’s a physical piece of computer that handles the file requests for all users. If you have your website hosted on a web server, it’s most likely a piece of software that handles the hosting of many websites, including yours.

During the spring, I received a call from a new prospect that was interested in seeing how I could help them. After they explained the problem, my heart sank. This customer had been running their entire business on a Dell computer that was purchased in 1996.

This computer, in 1996, was top notch – it had plenty of memory and hard drive space. In 2007, however, Windows NT 3.51 and a Pentium 2 processor make this an old computer. A very old computer. For that matter, we don’t even support Windows 95 anymore – Windows NT 3.51 came out in 1993!

They did not want to upgrade because they had spent $4000 on this computer in 1996 – their reason for calling me was the hard drive crashed and needed to restore data from it.

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Your car can tell you when it has a problem, why not your computer?

With certain models of vehicles, you will get this great piece of technology that will email you when your oil needs to be changed, when the tire pressure is low or when there is a problem with the engine.

What a novel idea! Make your computer do the hard work and email you when something bad happens.

Over the years, I’ve seen many disasters (not with our customers, thankfully) and the majority of them occurred because no one was watching the computer logs for errors.

With the new technology that is out, we can avoid issues like my friend Bob D had – a server in his QA department died. At least that was the call we received.

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It’s not unusual to have a washing machine for 15 years or a car for 10. However, the same cannot be said for technology, or any piece of electronics, and computers are no different.

A company in Manchester contacted me recently to help them with their main computer in the office – this computer was used to create medical animations for various companies, doctors and some patients. This computer was their powerhouse – a Windows NT 4.0 computer running a 386 processor, 1GB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. The computer was 10 years old.

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