Technology Advisor Blog

It's the latest buzz word in technology - the "cloud".  Many of our clients are asking about the cloud, so we want to take some of the mystery out of it.  The definition from Wikipedia sums is up simply:  "Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet)".  The name comes from the cloud diagram that is typically used in network diagrams to symbolize the Internet.  

Whenever there's a mystery regarding a "missing" email, the first thing we look at is if the email is sitting in a spam filter.  We always recommend just using one spam filter, preferably "in the cloud" so mail is filtered BEFORE it gets to your mail server, and distributed to your laptop, smartphone, iPad, and wherever else you read your mail.

In the first few weeks of using a spam filter, we know it's an inconvenience to have to approve senders when it would be obvious to anyone but a computer that it's mail that you want, but you'll be grateful to have the spam filter when you see all the clutter gone from your mailbox. Note that what appears in your quarantine is only the borderline spam content and that the rest of it is blocked in a "black hole". On average, across all the clients we actively manage, around 80% of all incoming mail is blocked or quarantined as spam!

If the words Cat5, USB, DVI, VGA mean nothing to you, don't worry, we can help!  These are all names of different types of cables that connect to your computer, and with this simple "show and tell" post, you'll know which is which.

Thanks to all clients who sent back a client survey card in the past two months.  Continuing a tradition we started last year, as a "Thank You" for taking the time to fill out the card, we have donated a pair of socks for each response to the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program.*

My laptop was running slow and I was starting to think about replacing it, and decided to upgrade to a solid state hard drive instead.  Wow!  What a difference!

Here's a question we hear a lot:  "Why doesn't my spam filter block ALL my spam?"  We typically implement Postini spam filtering for our clients (sometimes Barracuda), and when we examine the monthly reports, overall, about 80% of incoming mail is either blocked or quarantined as spam.  This is a HUGE amount of mail, and consistent with industry reports which typically track even higher in the 90% range.  The filters, though not perfect, keep a LOT of clutter out of your inbox and off your smart phone.

If you get a severe virus on your computer, or some sort of other system corruption, and it doesn't look like your system will ever work right again, don't panic!  It's possible to recover your system to its original state IF you have all your disks!

At the start of the Spring soccer season, I had the task of making sure all the practice and game times for my family got posted in my Outlook calendar.  With a game every weekend, and two practices during the week (times two teams), an entire season's worth of entries would have taken a long time.  The good news is that the soccer league made it easy by enabling an export of the calendar right on their web site.  With a simple click of the link to "Download for MS Outlook", they had already set up an export of the data, and all I had to do was import it into Outlook.

Keeping your computer system up-to-date is important, but every once in a while an update can cause a problem.  Recently, Internet Explorer 9 caused some trouble with Intuit Merchant Services.  In our office, what we saw is that hitting the "submit" button to complete a transaction did nothing at all (no error message, no response).  If you clicked away to "cancel", then an error message would appear.  Turns out there are several symptoms reported:  web pages missing information or not rendering properly, downloads not working, "Page Cannot be Displayed" when accessing known good links, and similar problems.