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Archive for 2010

Faster computers power faster business growth

Monday, September 13th, 2010

The modern office is definitely an amazing thing to watch. Emailing, scanning, printing, digital document processing, online database systems, more. What isn’t done via computer in today’s office? As a business owner or manager in charge of running an office, it’s important to remember that productivity in a digital office is often directly tied to the computers that power the office. Office productivity can be boosted significantly with simple technology upgrades. When is the last time the computer systems in your office were upgraded? What about the network? ISP? Accessories, such as printers, scanners, copiers? How about recently added mobile computing technologies (laptops, smartphones)?

Information SuperhighwayIt is important for your office to stay up to date with the latest technologies. When humans using computers power the majority of the operations in your office, it makes sense that faster computers will allow for faster work and increased productivity. Computers that have become old and slow due to age act as a handicap to your employees, and will hold them back from performing at higher levels. In addition, the speed factor is not the only negative that comes from using old technology. Older computers, networks and accessories are more prone to fail, causing office staff to take time away from work to focus on bugs, viruses, errors, and repairs.

Every office should maintain a reasonable technology budget that allocates a reasonable amount of money to spend, every year, on technology upgrades. When planning this budget, you should go beyond simply looking to replace computers that break. You should be looking to make upgrades that will increase office productivity. Simple things like replacing still working old computers with faster units, installing faster printers, giving employees access to email while in the field via laptops or smartphones. In addition to upgrades, your budget should include regular maintenance. A technician should visit on a regular basis, as often as once per week. Your technician should keep your computers updated, solve minor errors, and perform cleanup tasks to increase performance. That will limit the amount of time office staff must spend fiddling with computers and will allow them to focus on their work.

Ultimately, faster computers in your office will allow your office to perform more efficiently. You will process more work and, as a result, your business will have the capacity to grow further and faster than ever before.

Keeping technology working, so you can too!

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Can anyone name a small business, or any business for that matter, that doesn’t rely upon technology for day to day operations? Computers play such an integrated role in our lives. Much like automobiles, it is important to maintain your computers and run periodic checks on them to avoid failure.

When doing routine system maintenance, there are several different areas of the computer that should be checked for potential problems. The operating system itself, installed software, updates and patches, anti-virus definitions, the network settings, the system fans, dust levels, hard disk drives, backups, and external devices! Some are more important than others. For example, if your hard drive fails, you could face some very costly data recovery issues. Dust is another one, dust and heat are the biggest killers of electronic components. A competent computer repair firm will have a checklist of items that a technician will run through, the hard drive and dust levels being just one of those, to ensure optimal performance.

Not to get stuck on the automobile analogy, but it’s so easy to do comparisons between that and computer repair. If you forget to change your oil, over time your engine suffers. If you go long enough, eventually your engine will fail. Computer maintenance is the same way. A lot of clients have come to us with failed hard drives. Sometimes we can get their data off pretty easily and recover their systems. In the worst cases, those hard drives need to be sent off to a lab where data recovery becomes extremely costly. Client with crashed hard drives are usually surprised when we tell them that the crash could have been avoided. There are warning signs that most equipment will give when things go bad, and the signs usually begin a while before the actual crash takes place. For hard drives, it could be slow performance, errors while working, errors in system logs, or even clicking or grinding sounds. Most computer fans make noises too when they are about to fail.

Our experts service and repair machines and are experienced in the different ways you can identify computer problems. If you hire a team of professionals that know how to keep your computers working, and have them come out monthly for a quick checkup, you too will be able to keep working. For most people, computer failures usually happen at the worst possible time. Like, right before an important project deadline. If your computer suddenly crashes or the network is not working you may lose work and income. All of this could be avoided with just a couple hours of preventative maintenance per month.


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Thoughts from Matt Cutts: Google, Gadgets, and SEO

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Excerpts from some thoughts by Matt Cutts on the important release date of Google Instant. Full text posted here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thoughts-on-google-instant/

We try to return relevant, useful results. We try to return your search results really fast. Average users might not notice changes like Caffeine (improved indexing) or a better algorithm to detect hacked sites.

Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?” Here’s an video I did last year, but it still applies:

Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time.

Finally, Steve Rubel’s headline on Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant is too big of a claim to be correct, but the point he makes is that Google Instant includes personalization, and personalization changes SEO. Well, that’s common sense in some regard (see this interview from 2007 where I make that point). But that doesn’t mean that SEO will die. I’ve said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen.

Q: I don’t like Instant! I’m turning it off!
A: We provide that option right next to the search box, but I’d encourage you to spend some time with it first before you have a knee jerk reaction. Instant is a great way to learn more about things you’re not an expert on, and it can save you time. As the Google Instant page mentions, “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year. That’s 500+ human lifespans saved a year by this feature if everyone used it. 🙂


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Official Press Release: seenBEST Web Design, a New Division of my PC Techs

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Visit PRWeb for the official press release announcing the my PC Techs new corporate division, seenBEST Web Design. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/09/prweb4469064.htm

While there, be sure to check out the “Share This” tools on the page to share with friends!

For any questions regarding this announcement, please call (602) 456-0150.


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Setting a default page for a parked domain using .htaccess on a server with multiple domains

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

There seem to be plenty of help articles that talk about ways you can set the default web page for a domain using .htaccess. Most of these articles assume that you are hosting a single domain on a single host. What I am going to tell you is how to do the same thing when you are hosting multiple parked domains on the same host and need one domain to point to a different default page than the others.

We will be using the .htaccess file for this purpose. If you don’t know where to find it, look in your public_html (“root”) html folder. If the file doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create it using plain text and name it .htaccess

In this .htaccess file you may already have a setting that looks similar to this:
DirectoryIndex index.php default.php

This setting controls the pages that your parked domains will all look for by default. For example, when visiting https://www.mypctechs.com, if the above setting was in my .htaccess file, the server would deliver index.php first and default.php if that didn’t exist.

Because you are trying to get a parked domain to visit a different page than the two shown above, you’ll need to add some additional commands in your .htaccess file ABOVE the DirectoryIndex page. Otherwise the server will process the DirectoryIndex directive and your commands later in the file will never be executed.

Start at the top of your .htaccess file and add the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?thenameofyourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ newdefaultpage.php [L]

Change thenameofyourdomain to the domain that you’d like to set a new default page for. Change newdefaultpage.php to the name of the page that you’d like as default.

Doing this will preserve your standard default.php and index.php for all other domains, while giving your new domain a different default landing page. Upload your new .htaccess file to the server and enjoy!

NOTE: Be very careful when editing your .htaccess file and always make a backup copy of the file before you change it. If you notice any problems with your site after the changes you can always revert back.


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