Preventive Maintenance Plans Are a Very Good Idea
Preventive Maintenance Helps Safeguard Data
Most of our clients find the information stored on the hard disk is much more important than the hardware that stores the data. Taking steps to protect this information makes sense. That is what preventive maintenance is all about.
Preventive Maintenance Improves Security
Regular virus and spyware scanning is critical to keeping your data safe. Security patches and software updates are released several times each month for a variety of software. Some notify you, but others do not. All are important if you wish to stay protected. System and security logs give a wealth of information about the state of the equipment and the network. By checking the logs, we often spot potential problems early and avoid emergencies by fixing problems before they become noticeable.
Preventive Maintenance Improves Performance
Some aspects of computer systems degrade in performance over time. This has even given rise to the colorful term of “Windows rot“. Preventive maintenance helps improve the overall speed of system and network performance in these respects.
Preventive Maintenance Saves Money
You’ve heard the old adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It may be trite, but it’s also true. Avoiding problems saves you money in the long run, compared with laying out cash for new components or repair jobs. Emergency repair procedures can consume your IT budget at alarming rates. Most preventive maintenance procedures are quite simple, compared to troubleshooting and emergency repair procedures. This saves you much time (and stress!).
Exchange: OWA displays all mailboxes in a directory browsing format
Problem: After some unrelated changes are made to IIS 6.0, Exchange’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) acts differently. The normal login page is replaced by a login dialog box. After logging in, OWA displays all the mailboxes in a browseable directory format instead of the normal OWA content. You can select your mailbox and all folders display in the same manner. Charles Yang from Microsoft presented a solution that (mostly) worked for me in this situation.
Make Disk Cleanup Faster
Running Windows Disk Cleanup on a regular basis is really a great idea to keep your computer running lean and efficient. The only problem is, if you are like me, I’d almost rather visit my dentist than wait for the utility to complete its scan. It turns out that about 90% of the wait is the result of just one type of scan, and that scan is essentially pointless. Here are the steps for disabling this annoying “feature” and making your Disk Cleanups as fast and efficient as they should be!
Alphabet Soup – Chat Acronyms
FWIW there are a lot of acronyms out there, especially on AIM, YIM, MSN, and IRC. I am FAQ about what these things mean. It would be nice to tell people to RTM, but AFAIK there aren’t very many comprehensive lists available (BICBW). So, here is a list of many common acronyms I’ve seen used from time to time. HTH. IAE, if I left some favorite ones out, BMG to add them in the comments. Just keep them kid-friendly. Thx!
Outlook Express/Outlook Won’t Save Passwords
Symptoms: Every time you open Outlook Express or Outlook you are asked to re-enter your password even though the Save Password box is checked (or grayed out).
Problem: Generally this is caused by a problem in the Registry with the Protected Storage System Provider key.
Resolution: Follow the steps below to fix this problem or visit Microsoft’s Knowledge Base article 29684 for an even more detailed information.
Top-10 That I Miss
MSN has a feature titled “Top-10 tech we miss“, part of the celebration of CNET’s 10th anniversary. It got me thinking about the technology that I miss.
Heat and Hurricanes
It’s summer, and the thermometer has been stuck above 100°F (37.8°C) for 6 days, almost tying a record. There’s a certain laziness in the air. It’s just too hot to move around much! I really feel sorry for people who do roofing, lay asphalt, or work in the fields with the sun beating down on them on days like these.
People aren’t the only ones to suffer in the heat though. These past few days have been busy here, too. It seems that extended heat like this will give any equipment, especially air conditioners and other cooling systems, a real workout. Marginal components become overwhelmed and stop working. This can cause disruptions in Internet service (like it did for Comcast this morning), servers (like one of ours because air conditioning went out on Sunday), and in other electronics. Despite the lazy summer days, computer failures have been keeping us busy these past few days.
What are you doing to “summer-ize” your computer network?
Apple turns 500 Million
Isn’t it funny how you can just accidentally stumble across a piece of history in the making? I visited Apple’s home page and noticed a counter listing how many songs had been downloaded, and it was counting up to 500 million. The counter was at 499,996,000 give or take, but was climbing very rapidly.
Harry Potter and the Half-Right Wikipedia
Being a person who cares about what happens to Harry Potter and his friends, I wanted to find some spoilers about the latest book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (HP&tHPB) before I tackled this rather lengthy piece of literature.
When the 5th book came out, a few fan sites helped prepare me emotionally for the death of a key figure in the story. I don’t like unhappy surprises or sad endings, so I wanted to check out HP&tHPB before I started reading.
First, I visited The Leaky Lounge, the discussion board for The Leaky Cauldron. I don’t know what is the matter with the e-mail system (probably overwhelmed), so I have not received my activation e-mail for my account. That limits my access, so I turned to Google.
Maintaining Your PC – Part 1
One of our clients sent me the following e-mail request:
Can you shoot me an email … with detailed instructions (how to’s) about … weekly & monthly cleanups … (Adware, Spyware, &/or other?). I keep getting official looking advertising pop-ups [regarding] such and am a little nervous to either do something or do nothing with them. I’d appreciate it if you could help me with this.
Realizing that my response could lead to a few blog entries, I decided to kick off a series of articles tentatively called “How-To Tuesdays.”
So, here is the first article in the series: the steps that I would recommend for the average small office/home office (or “SOHO”) users to keep their computers running smoothly…
Welcome!
Welcome to AcanthusTech’s TechnoBlog!
Acanthus Technology Design (AcanthusTech) is very pleased to present this blog for your amusement, education, and enlightenment. At least, we hope that it will provide some or all of those for you. 
This blog will focus primarily on computers, networking, the Internet, telecommunications, industry trends, and the issues facing the Information Technology culture. We plan to intersperse that with cool things we find around the Internet, a little humor, and probably a bit of sarcasm from time to time.
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