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Finding the right IT Support company for you

By |September 1st, 2015

Like any other specialist area, IT (or generally, technology) is not something that everyone is capable of dealing with on their own. But how do you go about finding the right IT Support company for you? Well, it’s not as simple as ‘pick a card, any card’, there’s a lot more to it than that……

When it comes to things that are outside my area of expertise I accept that I need to build a relationship with someone who can help guide me in the right direction. At home, I wouldn’t attempt to make any repairs to the plumbing (I’m so cack handed when it comes to DIY, I’d certainly need someone to come and repair my attempt at a repair!), so I have a plumber that I know and trust. This extends into many fields (electrician, TV aerial guy, financial advisor, car mechanic etc.). At work, there’s a similar group tasks that are important, of which my knowledge is limited. Banking, tax matters, business insurance; they’re all jobs I hand over to people with more knowledge than me in their particular field.

From a small business perspective I see these specialist positions as forming my own unofficial ‘board’ – a group of specialists who are able to guide me in their respective fields towards my business goals. Your board members may include an accountant, a HR person, bank manager, and for many small businesses a technology person is essential.

But, whether you are looking for a support company at home or work, what you should look for when you search for someone? There’s a few common things you should look for so let’s look at those.
Trust
First and foremost, you need someone whose opinion and advice you trust. […]

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Looking for users with Apple Music problems

By |August 18th, 2015

Like many people I was straight on board with Apple Music when it launched. Unlike some of them though, I’ve had no Apple Music problems whatsoever.

Today I’m trying to understand what problems people are getting, and see if I can help explain whether their problems are caused by the Apple Music software, or their understanding of how it works. I’ve had a couple of people with issues recently, all of which have been resolved by having it set up correctly on their devices. Like many iCloud services, if you use multiple devices, settings on one can affect the others and cause you some problems

If you’re an Apple Music subscriber and are having problems using it, please get in touch with me using the following form so that I can try to get some idea of what problems people are seeing. Anyone who replies will have their Apple Music problems looked at (and I’ll do my best to resolve them for you), and then I’ll collate some information based on the replies so I can put some blog posts together to help you in future.

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Password security (again)

By |August 11th, 2015

I’ve mentioned this several times before (here, here, and here), but if you’re one of the 2.4 million people at risk because of the Carphone Warehouse data loss recently, now might be a good time to heed my advice on password security. It’s also a timely reminder that nobody is safe if they ignore the risks and don’t protect themselves with some essential security measures.

Hackers generally don’t steal data for kicks and giggles. Most of them are fully aware that they are committing a criminal act, and as such they’re generally looking for some kind of reward. Of course there are some people who do this for attention, but on the whole they’re doing it for financial reward.

With your money…….
How do they get your money?

Ordinarily they’re trying to engineer a way to use your online accounts elsewhere to obtain cash, goods or services by having you pay for it.
First they steal a database from somebody; this data contains your username and password for that company.
Although the password information is usually encrypted, with the huge amounts of data they steal, and the technology availble to them, it’s a simple process to ‘crack’ the encryption if you use a normal word as a password, or part of a password. The more complex the password (i.e. random), the more difficult it is to crack the encryption.
Once they have your password for one service, they’ll try it with lots of others. This may reveal further information about you which can be sold online to identify thieves. Or grant them access to your accounts enabling them to order high resale goods for themselves. This kind of crime has been going on for years, well before the Internet was commonplace […]

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Avoiding Facebook scams

By |August 4th, 2015

Several times recently on my personal Facebook page I’ve pointed out to friends and family that things they are sharing and commenting on are fake, or scams. At best these items showing up on my Facebook feeds are an anoying waste of space. At their worst though, there is a risk of something much more damaging, especially to those less aware of the dangers of the Internet.

I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post about avoiding Facebook scams for a while, and it’s proven difficult for me to put the whole thing into words. To me it’s obvious why I shouldn’t repost a Facebook post offering free iPads/airline tickets/cars etc.- ultimately no good can come of it! But maybe you don’t understand what could happen…..

Realistically, very few of the ‘Claim 1 of 100 free…..’ pages are genuine. They’re run by scammers who, one way or another, are trying to use people to make themselves some money (and I’ll explain how they do that later in the post). The question I often get asked is how would people know if an offer is genuine? Honestly, if you have any doubt, please DO NOT SHARE, LIKE OR COMMENT on these posts. But let’s take one recent example and work through it.

Did you see a recent Facebook offer where Virgin Airlines were giving away free flights for a year for 500 fans? This was allegedly to celebrate them serving 100 million passengers. To stand a chance of being one of the 500, you had to share a photo (which was a Virgin Atlantic boarding pass) and ‘Like This Page’ (the link took you to a Vacations We Love page).

Now the images looked genuine, and it was on a Facebook […]

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Very kind feedback

By |July 24th, 2015

It’s always useful to get feedback from clients, whether it’s good or bad. The positive ones are always nice to hear, and the negative ones help us learn what we can do better, and these are the ones I try to spend more time focussing on.

But this morning it was especially good to open my email and receive this short note from a recent client:

 

 

The email came from a client who purchased a ToughTech Duo from me some time ago and ran into trouble a couple of times with understanding exactly how to use the device. Based a couple of hours drive from us, it was impossible to visit her and show her face to face which would have been ideal in the circumstances, so there was a long exchange of emails and phone calls that eventually has got her up to speed and using the device how she expected. As you can imagine, this wasn’t without its problems! Talking someone through a technical question over the phone and email can be cumbersome, but finally we seem to have got there!

This kind of feedback of course is invaluable. Not only does it make me feel good to have a happy client, it’s also great to put these testimonials on our web page.

If you’ve used our services in the past and would like to offer some feedback for me to put on to our new web site (which is in development), I’d really love to hear from you.

In the mean time, thanks to today’s sender, Helen – it really is appreciated.

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