Tech Smash

Common concerns when migrating to an IP phone service

admin — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:25:06 +0000

IP or Cloud PBX phone service may be the most popular choice for communication systems among businesses today.
TMCnet reports that out of the 3,000 global CIOs that IBM surveyed, 60 percent say that migrating to cloud phone service in five years’ time was part of their organization’s plan to gain a competitive edge and to grow their business. This is almost double the number of CIOs who planned to migrate to cloud computing two years ago
Cloud computing is not just popular among large enterprises. In the same article, TMCnet cites a Microsoft study indicating that 39 percent of SMBs are expected to adopt cloud phone services in the next three years.
But even with the rising popularity of the cloud, there are quite a number of businesses that are hesitant to migrate to cloud phone service providers. Two of the common concerns are the following:
Reliability
While many businesses may acknowledge that the cloud is the future of telephony, companies that are used to traditional phone systems are understandably hesitant to make the shift. Why fix what’s not broken, they say, especially if the alternative does not seem to be reliable? Last mid-April, Amazon experienced a multi-day outage during a regular upgrade effort. The outage took down social networking sites such as Reddit and Foursquare. The loss of even a day’s worth of phone service undoubtedly leads to a lot of customer backlash and halts business productivity, risks which no business wants to take.
Security
Another major concern is cyber security. FoxBusiness reports that the number of VoIP threats has increased over the last year. A quick Google search can lead crackers to accessible downloads of fake caller IDs and other internet phone cracks. While storing data in the cloud leads to virtually unlimited storage space and massive cost savings in the long run, it also makes your phone system vulnerable to phishing, malicious hacking, phone hijacking and information stealing.
Safeguards
While traditional PBX is “not broken”, any business wants higher productivity at less cost, and generally a better way of running things. IP telephony can provide these. To safeguard against reliability and security issues:
• Store, share and automatically back-up data in a secure web interface. This way, you can easily restore or delete information.
• Plan a back-up power supply, in case of ISP/cloud provider outages
• Implement tighter security measures for your most sensitive data. Network Master Consultant Cliff McGlamry doesn’t suggest across-the-board upgrades as this becomes self-defeating and counterproductive, leading to delayed booting times and performance loss.
• Choose established phone service providers
Any technology, old or new, is not completely failsafe. The reality is that cloud phone service has been proven efficient and cost-effective, as evidenced by the many businesses opting to make the shift. By safeguarding your IP system, you too can experience the complete benefits of cloud computing.

5 Tips for Making Your Ink Cartridge Last Longer

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:23:10 +0000

The use of printers is ever increasing with the printer devices becoming cheaper; but it is the ink/cartridge cost that makes the user worry sometimes. If you follow some ink saving tips, you might be saving some good money on your printing cost. Here are few tips from me :

Tip 1 – Print Preview
Always preview what you are about to print, and ensure that you absolutely need everything shown on the page, and all of the pages scheduled to print. You can select individual pages and sections of the document you want to print in the print preview window, and this can help prevent you from printing off lots of stuff you don’t actually need, saving you ink.

Tip 2 – Print Default
Change your print default to one of the economy settings, as these will print off in paler tones and use much less ink making your cartridge last much longer.

Tip 3– Printing Photos
It can actually be cheaper to get your digital photos printed by a specialist online printing services, and not only will this save you on money and ink in your home printer, but the results can also be much higher quality.

Tip 4 – Avoid printing Graphics
When you print off a website there may be lots of banner ads and graphics around the page which will print off along with the text. You probably will not actually need these graphics and these will use a lot of ink, so make your cartridge last longer by highlighting the text you want to print off, and then choose the ‘selected text’ only print option.

Tip 5 – Type of Printer
You must be knowing that inkjet printer users more ink as compared to laser printers. The laser machine is costlier to buy initially, but in long run it helps you save money by printing more papers.

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Spring Cleaning for the Windows Registry: 3 Steps to an Error Free System

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:53:41 +0000

The Windows® registry is more or less prone to becoming corrupt over time. There isn’t anything you actually do as a PC user to cause this to happen, it just handles so much data that over time it becomes bloated and can require a good once over to clear out the old bad information.

Unfortunately so much of a computer system depends on the registry file system it effects the overall performance of your computer. Frequent freezing, crashing, DLL and Runtime errors are all symptoms of a potentially corrupt registry.

Fortunately you can clean the windows® registry using a utility program. These registry cleaners scan, backup and repair items that could otherwise take the laymen PC user weeks to uncover. For this article we’re going to assume you have a registry cleaner already, if not we suggest you compare registry cleaners such as Registry Easy, Regcure and Registry Mechanic before buying one. It’s a great utility to have on hand and the improvement in performance is worth the price.

Scanning

Before we can fix anything we need to know what is wrong. Registry repair programs perform a complete scan of the registry file system. It can take 1-10 minutes to complete this scan depending on how old your computer is and which program you’re using.

Once the scan is complete you’ll be presented with a list of registry entries that could be causing troubles for your computer system.

Backup

Before you ever make a change to a file structure as important as the Windows® registry you must backup the current settings. Why? If for some reason the changes made cause your PC to crash or perform even worse you’ll have a copy of the settings prior to making the changes and can easily revert back to the way things were.

Most registry cleaners have a built in backup utility. Be sure to use this before going to the next step, repairing the registry. As an alternative to a registry cleaners backup functionality you can also use Windows® restore points.

I personally suggest you use both because it ensures you have two options for restoring old settings.

Repairing

The final step in cleaning out your registry is repair those items found in the scan. Not ever item found during the scan is a serious error that is causing your PC to perform slowly. Quite often it’s only a handful of errors that are really causing the troubles, but it’s impossible to know which ones.

Registry cleaners have two options for performing the repair, a manual and automatic method. The manual method allows you to go through the entire list of errors found and choose which items to repair. I usually opt for the automatic repair which is much faster. The automatic method repair all items found in the list, if something changes for the worse you always have your backup and restore files handy.