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.

A Brief History of Geeks – PC World

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)

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.

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.

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.

Fortunately, I was able to take the hard drive out of their old computer and install it in a newer computer and restore all of their data – another disaster avoided.

Here is what I told them and this is a good rule of thumb; computers that are 5 years old or older need to be replaced. The cost of a new computer nowadays is the lowest it has ever been. It’s not worth your time (or ours) or your money to keep old computers running. While I realize it is an extra expense, the problems that come along with old computers, or even old technology, will take your business down for longer periods of time.

Don’t feel like you should replace your computers every year, but think about instituting a ‘3-year replacement’ rule, where you replace one computer every 3 years. This way you don’t break the bank, have less problem computers and will limit the about of downtime in your business.

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.

When we went on site, it was determined that the hard drive was dead. Now, it wasn’t the only hard drive in the computer, nor was it the only hard drive with Windows installed on it – although it did happen to be the one with all of the data.

So after 6 hours of downtime, we bought a new hard drive, installed the drive, booted the computer up and restored the data from a remote location.

The new technology mentioned above would have alerted someone that the hard drive was going to fail before it actually failed. That way the hard drive replacement could have been scheduled to happen after hours instead of interrupting the busy work day.

Now IT Works offers such a product – it’s called PC Crash Protection. Not only will it tell you if your hard drive is going to fail – it will email us when your backup fails, if a service does not start, if someone is attempting to login multiple times or with a disabled account. Did I forget to mention – it also provides automatic anti-virus and anti-spyware protection through AVG.

Contact Now IT Works for more information about this revolutionary new product! Visit our company website to request more information or contact an account manager at www.nowitworks.com

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.

Here we are in 2008 and none of the hardware or software is under warranty – or even supported by any vendors. 10 years is a long time to wait to upgrade your computer.

In this customer’s situation, we were able to retrieve the data, but they were stuck without a money-making computer and looking at spending $5,000 to reinvest in a PC and software licensing.

You do not have to replace your computer every year, or even every 18 months, which is common for the ‘folks living on the edge’…

Follow this schedule to replace your computers and you should be in the clear.

• Desktop computer – replace every 3 years

• Notebook computer – replace every 2-3 years, depending on how much abuse it’s taken

• Server – replace every 5 years