Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Happy Birthday to one of our “oldest” customers

Friday, August 20th, 2010

We would like to wish Tony Trinder of OPM Finance a very happy 57th Birthday today.

 

Tony and his much younger looking wife Janine

Tony and his much younger looking wife Janine

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

OPM are specialists in financing all types of business equipment from complete IT solutions, software funding, security and telephone systems, leisure equipment to vehicles. Unique facilities for all types of equipment are provided to UK commercial business users, universities, colleges, schools and local government.

CSE have been pleased to provide IT support and solutions to OPM for the last 10 years and look forward to continuing to do so for many more.

Happy Birthday Tony from all at CSE.

Happy Birthday to you

Happy Birthday to you

Happy Birthday dear Tony

Happy Birthday to you!

With thanks to Scott for ratting on him.

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Build in fault tollerance on your broadband line

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

We all rely on our connection to the outside world more than ever these days! It’s not enough to have the computers on, they need to be connected to the outside world for email, web browsing and instant messaging etc. This is especially true for businesses of course who rely on their connection to trade with their customers. Generally speaking most small businesses rely on a single ADSL line and if that goes down, which they do from time to time, then they are helpless until it comes back on-line which can be anything from a few hours to a few days in some cases.

Why not consider having a second ADSL line put in place, they are not expensive these days and you can get one for about £30 a month, preferably with an alternate provider so that if you have a problem with one line the other will carry on working.

If you POP your mail there will be no problems and if you get your mail via SMTP then with the right routers and rules set up at your Internet service provider hosting your mail you can send and get your emails via both lines. You can also bind the two lines together for faster broadband access too. The big advantage of course is that should one line go off you will still be able to get your mail and browse the Internet.

How two lines are better than one.

How two lines are better than one.

This will give a large degree of fault tolerance, you can go further than this with load balancing routers that can switch over the lines between them but as a first step this is a very sensible and economic option that will keep you working through an outage that would normally stop you. Of course you will still be going out to the Internet through your local BT exchange, but the chances are that this is not going to be down altogether, it is much more likely that there will be a problem with a single line, or a card in the exchange.

All in all I can’t see why any one would not want to put this type of system in place these days, the low cost makes it a no brainer.

Have a look at our website and contact us if you want more information on this type of solution www.cselimited.co.uk/contact.html and drop us a line, we would be happy to help.

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Retiring after over 30 years, well nearly!

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Bet this doesnt last the weekend out!

Bet this doesn't last the weekend out!

 Tom Elphick who has been with CSE for over 31 years is starting his semi retirement this week.

After being with the company for so long he just can’t bring to tear himself away from us all, so will be carrying on part time for three days a week to keep his hand in on printer repairs and of course to hold Daves ladder! Well it was either that or Pat would have had him down at B&Q.

Tom is our longest serving employee, he started working with us back in the days when floppy disks were 8″ wide and if you wanted to write double sided you had to turn it over, and more often than not programs were loaded on to a computer by means of a punched cardboard strip! Yes he really is as old as he looks!!

I remember talking with him back in the 80’s when Apricot brought out a machine with a 20MB hard disk drive (and yes I do mean megabytes, we had never heard of gigabytes then) and we were laughing about it wondering why they bothered making such a big drive as no one could possibly ever need to store that much data, shows what we knew!

 There are a couple of us still around who have worked with Tom for around 25 years and we can bear witness to the fact that he is still the same now as he was back then, always ready with a tale to tell, generally of the tall variety and a joke to share though after all these years I can’t say that there are many new ones!! Still it’s the way he tells em!

We wish Tom a very long and happy retirement except for Tuesdays,Wednesday and Thursdays when he can come in to the office and do his bit after all no one said we had got 30 years worth of work out of him :-)

Tom likes to play chess on-line, and with his new 22″ screen he will be able to see where he is going wrong, but if he is going to use his other gifts at the same time, (Whisky and decanter set) he may not improve for some time.

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Don’t get blacklisted as a spam sender.

Friday, March 12th, 2010

If you have read other posts on this blog you will know that we have covered various security topics including making sure that your antivirus software is up to date and that you run regular scans, set your users up with strong passwords etc. etc. etc.

This is another good tip for making sure that you’re getting the best protection out of the equipment that you already have.

The issue we are looking at today is one way of preventing getting blacklisted as a spam sender.

Assuming that you are not a spam sender (at least knowingly) one way that  you can get blacklisted is if one of your machines gets infected with a bot that is programmed to send out email for someone else. This can result in thousands or tens of thousands of emails going out of your network at which point your ISP (Internet Service provider) along with the anti spam databases will tag you as a spam sender. Your ISP will most likley turn your ability to send email off altogether preventing you from sending any mail until you prove that you have corrected the problem and are not going to send more spam, and secondly your domain/IP address will be listed on the various anti spam databases as a spam sender so any one using these to detect spam will reject your legitimate mail in future.

If you are using a mail server such as Microsoft Exchange on your network then this should be the only machine that is sending email out for you. Your firewall should be set so that the mail server is the only machine that is allowed to send email through the firewall, that way if one of your machines does get infected with a virus and starts sending thousands of emails out it will be prevented from doing so and you will not get blacklisted or have your mail turned off.

So what changes do you need to make? Firstly if you are not very clear on what you need to do then get an expert to make the changes for you, you could end up causing yourself major problems if you attempt to do this yourself and get it wrong. Basically what needs to happen is that the firewall needs to be set up so that:

  • The firewall should be set so that all outbound SMTP traffic is blocked from every host unless there is a further match
  • Then the next rule should be set a rule allowing outbound SMTP traffic from source “mail server”

OK it’s a bit more complicated than that but that gives you the basics. I hope that you found this article interesting, leave a comment and let us know.

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Choice of web browsers

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I thought that you might like to be made aware of something that you are likely to see on your computer in the next few weeks asking you to choose which internet browser you want to use.

You may be aware that Microsoft has been embroiled in a long running legal case with the European Commission relating to competition laws. One of the sticking points has been that Microsoft bundles an internet browser in with the operating systems called Internet Explorer. An agreement has now been reached whereby Microsoft will be giving the users the ability to choose from a range of browsers thus levelling the playing field for other browser manufacturers.

This will be achieved via the automatic updates that your computer downloads from the internet, the updates are due to be rolled out from March 1st and will result in your having to make a positive choice about which internet browser you want to use.

The first screen that you will see is shown below:

 
 
 

The second screen will give you the various options that are available to you along with links to learn more about the packages on offer. The options will be delivered in a random order so as to be as fair as possible. See below:

 
 

So what should you do?

You will need to pick one and we would suggest that you pick the internet explorer 8 option unless you have a real desire or need to use one of the others. On the grounds that you will only be getting this message if you are using Internet Explorer and working on the premise that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” you can carry on using the internet in the way that you have been used to working in the past. After all if you had really been bothered about using something else you would already have downloaded it and been using it already.

 

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Remote working in the bad weather

Friday, January 8th, 2010

 When I got home the other night it started snowing and didn’t stop all night and any thoughts that I might have had about driving the 25 miles in to work were soon dashed when I looked out of the window in the morning.

Fortunately our office is equipped with a remote working facilities via a Terminal server that allows us to work remotely from home as if we were in the office. I was able to lock myself away in the spare bedroom and log on to the works network from the comfort of my home, check my emails, send a note out to our customers saying that it was business as usual, and then get on with some work that I had planned to do in the office, the system worked brilliantly and was fast to use, I could access all my files and applications that I needed. In the end I probably got more done than if I had managed to get in to work and i didn’t bump the car or get stuck trying!

I know that the weather this last week or so is extreme, and I don’t expect it to do this all the time but other things crop up from time to time, having to look after the kids, the car breaking down, waiting for a repair on the central heating or just catching up on some work to meet a deadline. Working from home on the office systems can be a really useful tool that you should consider for your people.

See here for how you can have the same facility.

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5 Tips for a healthy PC

Friday, December 4th, 2009

The tips below offer some very simple advice on keeping your PC working correctly and efficiently.

1. Be careful what you install on your computer, remember everything that you install will take up room on your hard disk and sap some resources from your machines. Think twice, do you really need all those internet toolbars, screensavers and applications installed on your PC? It may work much faster without them.
2. Keep your Operating System and security software up to date. You need to do this to ensure that you are protected against the latest threats as well as getting the latest fixes to help your operating systems and applications run more smoothly.
3. From time to time it’s a good idea to review what programs you have installed on your computer. There may well be software that you no longer use and these can then be correctly removed (not just deleted) to free up both space and resources. You can also run the disk cleanup to remove temporary files.
4. Using the tools built in to the operating system, check your hard disk for errors and run the disk cleanup and defragmenter on a regular basis, this helps keep the hard drive running efficiently and can speed up the retrieval of data from the drive, conversely if left undone for a long period of time your machine can slow down.
5. Keep your machine clean, if your PC is full of dust then it may well run hotter than it should and this can cause damage to the components. Keep it as dust free as possible and have it cleaned out from time to time to allow good airflow. It goes without saying that you should not obstruct the airflow through the machine.

Regardless of how well you look after your machine things can still break down so make sure that you regularly back up your data correctly so you don’t loose it.

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Anti-virus video

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

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Windows 7

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Well Windows 7 will be released tomorrow, how will it compare with Vista?

We think that it will be more sucsessful than Vista, we have been running it as a trail on a couple of PC’s for a while now and it seems to work well. Our engineers particularly like the new facility to run appllications in XP mode seamlessly which will allow users with older applications to take advantages of the new software without having to upgrade every piece of software.

Windows 7 is reported to be more nimble. Key performance improvements include:

Sleep
Windows 7 is designed to sleep, resume, and reconnect to your wireless network more quickly, great for laptops especially when the battery is low!

Search
When hunting for something, you want answers. In Windows 7, search results pop up faster. Sorting and grouping of search results is also significantly quicker

USB devices
When you plug in a portable flash drive or other USB device for the first time, Windows 7 can have it ready for you in seconds. If you’ve used it before, the wait’s even shorter.

Leaner and less busy
Unlike its predecessors, Windows 7 is designed to run speed-sapping background services only when you need them. Not using a Bluetooth device? Then the Bluetooth service in Windows 7 stays off. Windows 7 is also less memory hungry than Windows Vista—another under-the-hood tune-up that can boost overall performance.

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Malware

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Everyone has heard of computer viruses and yet there is still a lot of confusion about what they are and what they do. Most people still think of viruses as software that is designed to attack your computer, delete your data or both and whilst this is true there is a lot more to it than that.
There are different types of malicious code to be wary of these days, viruses, spyware, trojans, keyloggers & scareware etc. These can collectively be termed malware, and you do need to be concerned. Whether it’s a simple cookie making your browser take you to a specific internet site, or display a popup on your screen to try and get you to buy something or a keylogger looking to steal your credit card details you need to take care that you don’t fall victim, so make sure that your antivirus package is up to date and working correctly and that it is offering the right level of protection.
You might ask, why do these people write these programs, is it a 13 year old spotty lad messing around on his computer? Well I guess there is still an element of that however these days it’s big business and big money for some, especially for organised criminals, from selling counterfeit goods over the internet to extortion by demanding money from companies to avoid a denial of service attack on their website ( an orchestrated attack on a particular website with thousands of machines all logging on to it at once to stop legitimate customers logging in), just imagine how much an online merchant site would lose if there website was taken down for any length of time, a gambling site before the grand national for example and how much they might pay to avoid it.
There are many threats but some of the most common fall under the category of trojans and bots, these are software packages that hide on your computer without you knowing (they don’t want you to know that they are there) and wait for instructions from its master and then act on those instructions, this may be to take part in a denial of service attack or to send bulk emails via your computer i.e. spam mail, yes people do buy the junk that comes through on the spam folder, if you send enough then a tiny percentage of people will buy. These Trojans can be asked to do almost anything, the BBC in one of there technical programs recently carried out an experiment and bought control of thousands of computers worldwide from a website and got them to do certain things before letting people know that they had a problem, they had no idea that they were even infected.

Why not go to www.eset.co.uk/ThreatCenter/OnlineScanner for a free online scan of your computer to see if you have unwanted guests or call CSE to discuss your situation on 0161 941 4555.

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