image source: ehow.com

[this post is from Dennis Houseknect, West Virgina USA]

Businesses large and small have to manage risk. They invest in measures to prevent risk, including fire sprinklers, alarm systems, security cameras, employee training, and insurance.

What is the single biggest risk businesses face? Fire – no. Break-ins, shoplifting, or other traditional crimes – no. Floods or other natural disasters – no.

For the past two years, the biggest risk faced by businesses is……..Cybercrime.

Cybercrime has become more profitable than the illegal drug trade.

Cybercrime is not perpetrated by casual hackers or “script kiddies”. It is perpetrated by highly organized and very well funded criminal organizations. These are the same criminal organizations that rob banks, run illegal gambling operations, and smuggle illegal weapons. Smart criminals go where the money is. The word “cybercrime” suggests something less nefarious than extortion or drug trafficking. That is unfortunate, because cybercrime is as ugly and malicious as it gets. Lives are ruined and companies put out of business by cybercrime.

Who is helping you understand the risks? Who is helping you understand the importance of investing in security? If you don’t talk about your organization’s security, who will? Nerds On Site is here to answer your questions, and provide quality solutions to protect your organization from digital threats! Call us today! 1-877-696-3737

Many keyboard shortcuts come built into Windows. Some are gimicky, like the “Aero” view in Windows 7 that shows a real-time view of open programs and allows you to quickly flip between them (Alt+Tab). Other key combinations are more practical, allowing you to quickly “lock” your computer from unwanted access, or easily zoom in for a better view of a webpage.

Locking Your Computer

Whether you want to leave your desk for five minutes or take an hour for lunch, it’s important not to leave your computer with different programs open on the desktop, as this can be a privacy and security risk. That said, you may not want to turn off your computer either, though that may be wise when you’re leaving the office for the day, in order to conserve power.

A quick way to protect your computer, and prevent even the temptation of others to snoop around on your system, is to quickly press and hold the Windows logo key while tapping “L”. This will lock your computer, and prevent it from being used until you enter the password to re-enter Windows.

Zoom Into A Webpage

Whether you are having a hard time reading an article, want to see an image more clearly, or need to focus exclusively on a section of a web page during a presentation, this is a handy shortcut to know, and can be used in any modern browser.

Press the CTRL key while tapping the “+” or “-” keys (beside the backspace key) to zoom in or out of a webpage. You can also find the option in the “view” menu, but that can be a hassle, especially if you want to zoom in quite a bit.

Select Multiple Documents

It’s easy enough to click and drag the mouse over several items to select them, but sometimes you only want some of those items selected in order to drag and drop them elsewhere or delete them.

Click one of the items, then hold down the CTRL key and click the other items in the folder to select multiple items.

Alternatively, you can click the first item, press and hold the “shift” key, and click another item to select both items and every item in between in that folder.

What are your favorite keyboard shortcuts? Let us know in the comments, on our fan page, or send us a tweet!

[thanks to Mike Duffy, a Nerd in Calgary, Alberta for this post]

Being proactive when it comes to your Technology and Information is becoming more and more important.  Reactivity to system issues results in Downtime, Loss Money, Productivity, and not to mention Undue Stress and Anxiety.

Nerds On Site is making it possible to be proactive with your Technology and Systems no matter what your budget is!! For a low monthly cost, Nerds On Site will monitor your computer, printers, servers and many other Network connected devices and inform you by email if there is an issues or concern you need to be aware of. We can even notify you that your printer is low on toner!

You NO longer need for a inhouse server for this type of Monitoring! All you need is one computer to start with Nerds On Site 24/7 Monitoring.

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Nerds On Site Monitoring will watch over your Vital Information and Technology.  When the first sign something is detected, Nerds On Site contacts you to help you get it taken care of it before it becomes a larger problem.

Being proactive not only save money and prevents down time it just makes sense.  Reduce frustration, and give yourself peace of mind with Nerds On Site 24/7 System Monitoring!

For more information or to get set up please contact us!

[Chris Rose from Newfoundland, CA contributed to this post]

“I had a client call this morning. He had been working on a Word document on Friday evening and somehow managed to save a blank document over the original document of 135 pages. We were able to log into the Nerds Backup system and retrieve the most recent version from late Thursday night. This saved my client from having to retype 60 pages of work from a backup he had placed on a flash drive approximately a month ago.”

Are you backing up your data on a regular basis, or even better, using an off-site, automatic system like Nerds Backup to provide you this same peace of mind in case something is deleted, misplaced, or becomes corrupted or damaged? Take a look at the Nerds Backup website. If it doesn’t suite your needs, there are many others that surely will, including Carbonite, Mozy, BackBlaze, among others. Find  one that you like and let it backup your data automatically, so you’ll never have to worry about data loss again. We can’t stress the importance of this enough!

Understandably, people are concerned and frustrated when they start receiving e-mail from people they know (or don’t know) asking why they are being sent junk mail. In some cases, the junk mail contains malicious attachments, or links to malicious websites that can contain viruses.

Why does this happen? Usually it’s because their email address somehow go on to a spammer’s list, and the spammer just happened to pick their email address that week. Spammers aren’t going to use their own email address to send out junk, because they don’t want it traced back to them, so they “spoof” someone’s email address, making it seem like the junk email is coming from them instead.

Once that starts happening, it’s nearly impossible to stop it until the spammer moves on to another email address in their list. In the meantime, recipients can create rules or filters to block certain keywords or move them to certain folders automatically until their friend’s email address is no longer being spoofed.

Taking proactive steps is the best approach, though. Guard your email address. Don’t give it out to just anyone, or to any website. Many of those websites say they won’t sell your information, but in some cases the spammers still end up getting the information.

If you sign up for something online, such as a newsletter, have an email account specifically setup to only receive those emails, and use another email account for correspondence with people you know. That way if the other account is compromised or spoofed, it won’t affect your important emails, or annoy your contacts.

Many junk and scam emails appear to come from legitimate sources, but in fact do not. This is an example of an email address used in a scam. The email address in quotes is what appears to the user. The email address in brackets is what the email address really points to. This may be visible when the user attempts to reply to the email.

You can find more examples of scams here.

We’ve all seen Chain Letter emails, with jokes and whatnot. They may be funny (or not), but it’s all of the email addresses in the “to” or “cc” fields that’s is the larger concern. Who knows where that email originally came from, or where it’ll end up eventually, which is likely on a spammer’s list. All those email addresses are gold mines from spammer’s. If someone is sending you those kind of emails, and you want to receive them, insist them use the ‘bcc” (blind carbon copy) field instead, so each recipient can’t see anyone else’s email address.

Be sure to take precautions when it comes to who you give your email address out to, and the emails you open or click links in. They can be very persuasive, and in some cases appear very realistic. If you’re suspicious of an email, contact your Nerd.

[this post from Nerd Scott Ledyard]

source: levelplatforms.com

Last time I checked, when you are admitted into a hospital room, they don’t ask, “Do you want us to hook you up to monitoring or not?” If you’re their patient, you ARE on monitoring and they strap you in.

We feel the same way. Monitoring of our client’s computers and other network devices is vital. And it’s really not optional: Nerds On Site has made monitoring a mandatory requirement for all NerdCare clients.

But let’s take a moment and think back to that blinking, beeping monitor in the hospital room. What’s it really doing? We visitors tend to think of it as an alarm, alerting the nurse if the patient’s health takes a turn for the worse.

However, the monitor is not only for the nurse, but for the doctor. The doctor is less interested in the alerts and more interested in the reports showing the trends of a patients vital signs taken over many hours and even days.

At Nerds On Site, we are fortunate that our monitoring tool of choice, Level Platforms, also captures BOTH types of vital data. It alerts us if there are impending troubles with a server or router. And it collects key statistics over time that let us sit back and analyze what’s going on – or going to happen – with the crucial bits of our client’s infrastructure.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “Are we a nurse or a doctor.” Trick question. Of course, we are both. Our clients need both, and we can only be trusted business advisers by looking out for their short-term and long-term best interests.

We are holding training sessions in the coming weeks to help Nerds learn the best ways to get the most from Level Platforms, which in turn they can pass on to their cleints!

QuickBooks has an impressive market share with our customers – Small and Medium Enterprises – worldwide and within Nerds On Site we applaud their leadership in making the financial management part of a business understandable by us non-accountants.

But, if you’ve used QuickBooks any length of time or support customers that do, you are afraid of a screen that looks like this (screenshot thanks to @jtrainer):

We encounter corrupt QuickBooks data way too often, and we have on several occasions requested QuickBooks to provide us with API access to the backup system so that we can apply more intelligent backup strategies outside of QuickBooks.

QuickBooks has a built-in backup feature that backs up its files that end in .QBW to files that end in .QBB. In many instances, both files are corrupted and have been corrupted for many backup revisions. In such instances, only QuickBooks themselves can repair the files. Due to the proprietary nature of QuickBooks databases, third parties are not able to do this effectively.

In addition, QuickBooks fees range from $250-$750 for repairs, so it appears from an outside perspective, that there’s a huge problem here:

Fact #1: no outside software can monitor and initiate backups, never mind hot-backups (backups while the software is in use)

Fact #2: QuickBooks has a significant revenue stream (in some cases more than the licensed software itself) in data recovery services

Clearly there is no motive for QuickBooks to do things differently. So, if you have had problems with QuickBooks data, please comment here and message them on twitter.com/quickbooks and let’s build some predictability with this great piece of accounting software!

Thank you for listening, QuickBooks (if you are).

This story is in regards to a client of ours in Pretoria, South Africa.

With the help of several Nerds including David Redekop, Francois Rossouw, Jonathan Arnoldussen, Dennis Houseknecht, Glen Schafer, Werdus Pretorious, and Lourens Dormehl, who spent several hours of hard work and head scratching was done right into the very early morning. Solutions were tried, and workarounds found. That morning, when the client arrived at work, he could not help but smile when he saw us waiting for him at his office.

The 10am meeting was held just after 7am, and the client made the decision to stay with Nerds On Site, even though he already had a far cheaper quote in hand from another IT company. The reason he gave for this decision? “We’re going with Nerds On Site – they have a better team!” So lessons were learned, and fingers burnt, but with the help of our dedicated team, we have WOWed another client!

Nerds On Site spend the weekend (July 8-10) the Vancouver Island MusicFest! We sponsored the event and provided FREE wireless internet to those in attendance! We had over 821 devices connected overall, transferring over 60 GB of data. In addition, there were 8,500 attendees this year walking past 2 Nerdmobiles parked at the entrance. So, plenty of people saw us! While there, Tim and Dian also worked with CKUA radio and gave them a better connection then they usually have when broadcasting remotely in their home city.

VIMF is a quintessential “west coast fest” featuring roots and world music performers from across Canada and around the globe! It’s 3 days and 6 stages FULL of music, interactive workshops, roving performers, funky crafts and delicious food, on site camping, major eco-initiatives, participatory art projects and more….

The event is held each July on the banks of the Tsolum River in the beautiful Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, Vancouver Island MusicFest welcomes over 1000 volunteers and over 7000 audience members for a magical celebration of music and culture!

Please check out http://www.facebook.com/vimusicfest for more of updates and information, and please “like” it to show your support!