Managed Services IT -vs- An In-House IT Pro For small to mid-sized businesses, it can be a struggle to balance the need for vital operating functions against tight budgets. How does that pertain to IT and what are your options? Let's take a look. IT specifically is such a specialized discipline, that [...]

We recently migrated a client from an SBS 2008 environment to a Server 2016 Hyper-V environment.  As we waded through the migration, we found that the server had a number of issues in addition to several non-standard configurations implemented by a former MSP provider.  I began to dismantle the services on the SBS server [...]

If your doctor told you that unless you made some changes you would not make it past six months, how would you prepare, or what changes would you make?  Would you follow his advice if it meant you could keep having birthdays?   Well, there’s a good chance you need to make some [...]

So recently I endeavored to repair a Windows 10 PC.  There were some unresolved issues for which there was no solid answer, and the best resolution path was to perform a reset or refresh of the OS.  I decided to do something a little less intrusive and performed a System Restore to a week [...]

So, you’ve decided to roll-out Office 2016 to your users, and you want to know what gotchas you have to be wary of.  Or like one of our clients, you’ve deployed to a user or two in advance, to take advantage of new features the user may need, and found out something’s missing.  That [...]

So it’s 4:00 on Wednesday afternoon, and you have a print server with a bad drive in the RAID array.  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and with it, a long weekend.  A chance to work on that project at home that you’ve been putting off, or maybe just some overdue family time planned.  You don’t want [...]

One issue that has frustrated me a number of times is having a computer lose network connectivity and the connection status is listed as Public, rather than Private.  Normally, if the location type is wrong, you can click on it, and change it.  But at times, it gets stuck on Public and is not [...]

Have you ever been in a server room that had you scratching your head, and wondering, “What were they thinking?”  The images certainly don’t give you any warm fuzzies, do they? Several years ago, I was part of a group that was invited to Houston to be the entertainment at a Christmas [...]

How to Allow Legit Network Access Through Your Firewall Is your firewall or antivirus preventing legitimate network access?  If you said, “What firewall?” or “What Antivirus?” stop reading this blog!  You have far more pressing issues, primarily securing a new line of employment.  If you are still reading, how do you handle network [...]

As a solution provider who helps IT organizations keep up with the ever-evolving world of technology, I get the pleasure of interacting with many organizations. It’s during these interactions I get a very disheartening feeling that many organizations are unsure of all that is required to complete daily processes, what their disaster plan is [...]