Big business run big servers and have large number of licences but there are more small businesses who contribute more overall to Microsoft coffers but have a small voice. The question is how to increase revenue for Microsoft and keep the shareholders happy.

How to take more off you PART1

The first action was to remove Small Business Server, this gave small business all the toys the big boys have but for small business, Server, Exchange, SQL etc. at a fraction of the cost. If you want to replace SBS you need to find an extra few thousand £pounds.

How to take more off you PART2

So finding the extra £thousands is not an option, now being Microsoft you are arrogant enough to believe that you are the only solution. If they cant buy a. from you they will have to buy b. Enter the cloud, ideal solution, monthly payments to spread the cost, what every small business wants and Microsoft assume that you are too busy, lazy or unintelligent to do the maths.

So you sign up for the cloud?

Remember according to Microsoft, its your only option after all and you want 5 office’s and 5 e-mail boxes and 5 online storage. That’s £9.50 x 5= £47.50 a month for office and exchange e-mail in the cloud which is £2,850 over five years and you still haven’t got a central file server. Add a shared drop box account and that goes up to £7,950

But I get the latest versions and its available everywhere?

In five years, you will get one extra version over the outright buyer and when the Internet goes down or is unavailable you’ve got nothing and all work stops.

OK, what’s the alternative?

Just a quick thought, you actually want to write letters and make spreadsheets, you don’t actually want Word and Excel. Why not buy something that works the same for £40 or does the job for nothing? We can supply all of these alternatives or if you insist we can supply Microsoft too, but guess what, Microsoft give us more commission if we sell you the cloud version that the boxed product, now why would they do that, do you suppose?

Give us a call and we will show you how to save tons of money with your computing, what do we get out of it? well we make more money by taking less from you and we get a loyal customer too.

Ring us now for an informal chat:

Ipswich                  01473 231800

Colchester             01206 256459

Bury St Edmunds   01284 624231

Braintree                01376 802031

If you want to send a hidden message the best place to put it is in plain sight.

Those that know me well know that I am a fan of “Wierd Fish” T-shirts with the hidden message and I also get some printed with “in” jokes. I have to take my hat off to Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore.

I know it was a few months ago but he was seen wearing this T shirt which looks like its just got a Window10 logo on it. If you look carefully you will see its a series of 1’s and 0’s in other words binary. Binary only has two characters but its how computers store data. This can then be translated into words, its how computers store data.

Someone with more time than me, Twitter user Kévin Gosse evidently went through and decoded each pane of the logo to find what was written. Here are the messages.

• There are 10 types of people in the world
• Windows 10, because 7 8 9.
• Congrats on being one of the first.
• Windows Insiders help us develop the future. Talk to us @ Windows

I have a T shirt with the first, its an old IT joke, the punchline is “those that understand binary, and those who don’t”, think about it – binary “10” translates to “2”.

The second read out loud ” 7 ate 9″. The next two messages can mean as much as you want them to.

So once again, IT is not mundane, it has loads of knowledgeable people who have an innate sense of fun, the rest of those who think they are in IT are just “so unhip, it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off” – Douglas Adams .

Lets ignore the environmental debate on this topic, because if you don’t buy it, someone else will. There are several reasons why refurbished equipment makes sense, lets deal with them in order of importance and then we have a real disastrous, heavy warning at the end.

Where does all the kit come from?

There are two main sources, some companies like to change their IT every so often, like 18 months. Why? If you are the leading edge of technology you don’t want your guys to be seen using out of date equipment. I has to be the best for some companies. Other sources are short term contracts. If you want a building site for a project you hire a on on site portacabin with the latest kit and when the projects over back it all goes to be refurbished 6-12months later. 

Up to 80% Saving against new

You have a simple monetary choice when buying, you buy the best or the cheapest, Buying refurbished lets you buy the best there was 18 months ago at the cheapest price now. The only penalty is its no brand new. Buying the cheapest now will get you rubbish performance, low usable life and poor reliability. You can get a £1,200 Lenovo for around £400. That’s like getting a 2 year old Jaguar for £8K instead of £32K. The current Apple 27″ 5K retina display system is £1,999 new, you can save £700 by buying last years model or nearly £1000 for the year before.

Better reliability?

On the word of reliability there is a school of thought that says buying refurbished means better reliability as the problem new units have been removed. We don’t really agree with that as IT equipment is pretty reliable but the first six months is when the failure happens so you will definitely miss that problem area.

Not the latest model

No it isn’t, but its not far off. The ideal processor for business in either an Apple or PC is the Core i5 by Intel, thankfully AMD, virtually the only competition, seems to have disappeared from the market and that is an old discussion. The i5 has been around for six years, there have been four generations since it was introduced in 2009. The difference between the latest and the previous generation is not that great and the one before was also marginal. Only the first generation is now really out of date. So either Generation 2,3 and 4 will give you a good all round business system. Its like getting a faster instant coffee- not that important but better tahn starting with just beans if you are in a hurry.

Warranty

Usually the machines are still in warranty but all the Lenovo’s and Apples we sell come with a 12 month parts and labour cover. We sell the extended warranties but its your choice, the machines are at their peak of reliability but there is always one, and you might v=be the unlucky one. Two years cover for an Apple iMac is £175 but it could cost you that just for a faulty keyboard. With a laptop that’s a motherboard replacement.

What does refurbished mean?

Everything or nothing. Some people just wipe a machine and do a re-install and call it a refurbishment. We clean inside and out, replace anything that looks suspect so it doesn’t break down in use and then we grade them A as good as new, B slight imperfections, or C, scratches and marks. The batteries are tested to hold a charge for 24 hours.

Now the heavy warnings

1. Don’t buy a brand that doesn’t have a good spares reputation, this includes Dell and Sony.
2. We have seen refurbished machines that are insurance write offs’ from things like water damage which are coaxed back to life with a 3 month warranty, only they fail and screw up your data down the line.
3. Beware the non-official refurbish-er, all our systems are refurbished by either a Microsoft or Apple refurbish-er. We have seen pirated software on these and you are liable. They also install software that wont run correctly on that model.
4. The parts might not be genuine. We have seen some Apple systems with 8Gb of RAM which was not the right type and had also failed as it was cheap. The right RAM worked faster but cost more.
5. Beware of preloaded malware. We had a system in for repair which was bought from a shop in Colchester. whoever “refurbished” this loaded a key logger in a hidden file that sent data to a website. It’s easy for that to copy the credit card details that are typed in and send them off to be used by criminals, it was such a localised program that the AV solutions would not find it but we susoect it had been going on for years so we dread to think what they had collected. We always check our systems and load  trial AV and anti malware.

We only supply Lenovo and Apple as refurbished equipment

Everyone who works at CMX has a used Lenovo laptop, even me, and my wife has just moved from a desktop machine to a used Lenovo laptop to replace the tablet that she has decided to abandon. The Lenovo I am after is the one with an i7 and touchscreen with handwriting recognition at £900 its better than new at £2000. I don’t really need it but you may have noticed I have a PhD and a requirement of a doctorate is that you develop atrocious unreadable handwriting and this model can read it better than I can!

As the Greeks are topical  at the moment I thought I would start with the thoughts of Sophocles. Finding the right advice is not costly but the wrong advice is really expensive and I am recommending someone else!

We are often asked about things like Websites, SEO or communications, as in telephones. This often occurs because many IT companies “dabble” in these areas without being experts. Although we started as a company that sent data over telephone lines in the ’70’s we know the difference between “Doing” and being an expert.

Anyone can make a web site but it takes the knowledge of an expert to design it, make it work and get it seen. That’s enough of a job for anyone. Our guys at cmx could probably become experts at it but its a time bandit and it isn’t what we do. The reason? for example with all respect to car mechanics its cheaper for us to pay you guys to service our own cars rather than take time out the working day to do it ourselves.

Its like that with telecoms. It used to be that you would phone up BT get a few normal “phone” lines and hang a phone off the end. We know a lot of businesses that have come a cropper still thinking life is that simple. The BT salesman ends up extracting £6K for ISDN lines or VOIP be selling the “honest guv, its only few pounds a week routine”.

We know of a few firms who have been sold totally inappropriate kit. For example a company had all the big toys in terms of telecoms but wanted to relocate to a home office with three lines. The quote they received from BT was in excess of £3,000 a year. All they wanted was to make outgoing calls from three people. We talked to them, they added a line to their existing arrangement added an Orchid phone system and three phones, total cost £400 for the equipment. We don’t do “Telecoms” but we know how to add a few lines and a basic system onto the wiring we install for computers.

If you want proper phone systems and proper communications then don’t talk to BT, Virgin, Talk-Talk, Sky they can only sell you their products and the more the salesman can rip you off and tie you in the more commission the sales person gets, not the best basis for Trust and a decent recommendation. The long deceased MD of CMX whom I replaced  was a wise guy and I cherish a lot of his motto’s and as the text at the top says “Don’t base your decisions on the advice of those who dont have to deal with the results” was one of his.

We often get caught up in the, “Do you do phones?” question, immediately we can tell if our 4 lines and 16 extensions is suitable or not and we never recommend the other equipment “that we can get hold of” because its not right for the customer and breaks our ethos of being IT experts not “jack of all trades”.

Instead we turn to another expert and pass it to them, sometimes its just a question of what is best for a client but we are happy to hand over all the clients needs to these people who we know, like, and above all trust.

One of the questions I recently asked them was regarding one of our biggest clients and the advice was confirming what their own people had said, when I mentioned who this was and they did the decent thing as said oh they are good and if he is dealing with them, stay with him. I trust that advice, I know all the reasons, which I’m not going to share but they were good and again, ethical. I trust people who do that.

The choice is now staggering and I know many people who have installed VOIP to save money but they get inundated with false calls, The people who install ISDN for no good reason apart from they were sold it and the expensive stuff that goes with it.

If you are looking at phones for your business then talk to a whole of market expert, they need to get you the best deal so that in five years time, its still a good deal. We have a rule at cmx of “prove the need”, one of the ways you can do that with comms is to add up all the costs including calls in and out, yes incoming calls can cost you too, for a five year period, if you need a sit down when you see the figure then don’t do it without talking to an expert first. Don’t forget good advice is often free, its bad advice that really gets expensive. Talk to Sam O’Doherty at Ocean telecom 01284 729 869 and tell him I sent you.

On that topic before we disappear we were talking about BT a short while ago and they never cease to amaze us how they can screw anything up even if you plan for all eventualities, that’s why we like to deal with a UK telecoms company who deal with BT in the UK rather than the customer arranging everything through the nice people of India, I mean nice people, its their job and its not their fault they speak English and not talk it, there is a difference. Anyway, the ultimate screw up happened at one of our clients, they organised the comms to be installed three days before they opened. We had installed all the IT for the engineer to do the broadband next day. The engineer rolled up but unfortunately he could connect the broadband as the phone lines hadn’t been installed. The delay was an extra two weeks, HOLD THE ADVERTISING, MAGAZINES, OPENING PARTY, WEB SITE, LEAFLETS WE CANT TAKE CALLS OR E-MAILS, what a cost for all that hassle and missing launch dates! Should have talked to Sam at Ocean Telecom, he would have been on top of it every step of the way, how do we know that? Did I mention he is an expert in telecoms, which we, BT sales et al are not, and I know like and trust him and his company.

Meetings are often non productive and get in the way of actually doing any work.

I have often been heard to say “If you want to avoid a decision then, form a committee”.

Like everything else it works differently at CMX Business Computing. It works probably because we are all at the coal face and we don’t need a meeting just to stop working and look at another issue.

Our system won’t work for everyone but it does for us, and a variation might just work for you too.

What is a meeting?

Meetings are planned ahead, the topic decided, the location and attendees are chosen and it happens, those who don’t want to be there are bored and often decisions are dictated to the assembled or fudged. Meetings can be training sessions which isn’t a meeting at all.

When I had eighteen sales people I organised that every Friday at 4:30 we would have a sales meeting, it would last 30 minutes, I would collect the expenses claims and pay out last weeks. I thought I was being clever for the following reasons;

• It would always start on time, in case it ran late
• Everyone would be there, to collect expenses
• It would end on time, promptly at 5pm
• It avoided the POETS (Push Off Early Tomorrow is Saturday

It fulfilled my requirements as listed above but I didn’t account for the fact that the attendees were adults and being treated like this caused resentment. I was often ambushed with stupid requests such as ” we all want personalised Cross biro’s”, “We want an employee / family / friend purchase scheme at less than trade price”, “We all want company 4×4’s”, “We want a sports day”. These are genuine, I had to explain why not, whoosh- time gone.Sales people’s target met, expenses and nothing else, my aims didn’t even rate.

In forgetting that I was dealing with sales people, reps (meaning reptile not representative), I had forgotten that these guys were trained to be one step ahead and we had managed to be ahead of them up till now. I would never let any business proposal go out without it being approved by technical and financial directors to avoid “selling anything at any price”  which is so common elsewhere. Everyone hated this extra pre-sales burden and pressure because the timescale had to be unaffected. but it made for happy customers.

This resentment eventually saw its outlet in the weekly Friday meeting, they hated it, I hated it even more and the other directors wouldn’t attend as it was a sales meeting.

Luckily the type of business changed, all the salesmen went, No-one wanted sales demonstrations anymore, All the sales were being done through support engineers who were at the coalface being asked questions they honestly answered. New clients were attended to by directors, we left our cosy offices and desks and went out there doing what we reallydid best, using our knowledge and experience and managing less.

 The new Start

The business changed, instead of everyone arriving for work and going off, we split into two main offices and everyone could work and start from home. This meant we met each other less, our systems sent out the work. The specialists each had their own permanently allocated clients they looked after and we introduced a no-overtime system. If you need to be somewhere for an extra half hour, then don’t leave and return next day, stay and complete the work and then take the time off next day or week, this saved wasting time travelling.

If the work wasn’t being done or hours cut then it soon becomes apparent. We also “teamed” everyone in groups of three. If you wanted a holiday then OK it with the others first, if you needed help call on them, effectively we have several small groups, all working together.

They are all adults now

What we did was simple, everyone was being treated as a responsible adult team member. Its self regulating but the biggest change was meetings. We binned them because we changed the nature. They became “get-togethers” and “briefings”.

We have a period 9-10 am every Wednesday when at least two out of three directors get together. If no-one else comes we talk about marketing, planning or anything we want to with the business. Anyone from CMX can attend as long as they say so 24 hours before and say why, this is then circulated to everyone and they either turn up mob-handed or just the individual. Sometime its a moan that needs sorting, sometimes its an idea. The topic is always published so everyone at CMX can own what is happening.

The other thing is briefings. These are once a year and are to do with the direction of the company. An example was last year, Micrsoft discontinued SBS and we spend months looking at this as it is adversely impacting small businesses, it came up on Wednesday’s quite often. The result was a decision to change the company from a Microsoft house selling software with a bit of Linux on the side to a 50/50 Microsoft and Linux business installing open-source software.

A day was chosen for everyone in the company to be briefed, we chose a neutral site, I invited a guest speaker to perform the presentation and I went away for a week.

The idea was that the presentation was delivered by someone who could do it differently. I don’t drone on but sometimes my infectious, extrovert exuberant style sometimes “over-runs”. Everyone knew I was away and that they would have to wait ten days for the next “get together”. This allowed them to debate it all, there was no prejudgement as it didn’t come from a top down diktat. It wasnt critical as I went away. It was all explained as a need, a challenge, something we were already doing, the UNIX guys became excited at having new people to talk to and the Microsoft guys lost thier despondency at a lost market.

We don’t pay commission, we just, do what we do as enthusiastic, knowledgeable experts. They don’t have overbearing management, they are trusted, involved and feel that they are a part and own Cmx’s success.

They are treated as adults and realise that the Cmx directors face the same challenges they do. That’s why we don’t have “meetings” we have “get togethers” and “briefings”.

Google’s Chrome Web Browser doesn’t like laptops.

Rather than do a whose best we thought we would look at at anything that gets missed in the usual tests. First one up is Google Chrome.

Google Chrome, a laptop and Microsoft Windows is potentially a very bad combination. It will reduce your battery life, and slow down your computer.

Chrome eats through your battery quicker than other internet browsers. The problem is down to something called the “system clock tick rate”. This is something that you wont hear about because its something that Windows uses internally. As soon as Chrome is opened it sets the rate to 1.000ms.  The Windows default is 15.625ms. The numbers dont matter but what is happening does.

In any OS like Windows, events are often set to run at intervals. To save power, the processor sleeps when nothing needs attention, and wakes at predefined intervals. This interval is what Chrome adjusts in Windows, so reducing it to 1.000ms means that the system is waking far more often than at 15.625ms. In fact, at 1.000ms the processor is waking 1000 times per second. The default, of 15.625ms means the processor wakes just 64 times per second to check on events that need attention.

Microsoft itself says that tick rates of 1.000ms might increase power consumption by “as much as 25 per cent”. It’s also a problem because, by its very nature, the system tick rate is global, meaning that one application is able to spoil everything, and because regular users don’t care about tick rates, most of us would never know this was a problem.

So, what about other browsers? Well, when you open the most recent version of Internet Explorer, the rate stays at 15.625ms until the browser needs to do something where the rate must increase. If you go to YouTube, say, and play a video IE will increase the rate to 1.00ms. When you shut that tab, and carry on with normal browsing, it will return to 15.625ms. In Chrome though, it is increasing the rate as soon as the browser is opened, and it keeps it high until you shut the browser completely.

Many people never shut a browser. It’s usually left open for very good reasons for example Gmail, Google Drive and just leave it open on a news page to return to later. So if uyou use Chrome then the browser is eating more than it needs to of battery power.

So apart from needing to re-charge your battery whats the problem? Well sasimply every battery has a limited number of re-charges before it needs to be replaced. An average battery lasts 2 years, now according to this it means you will be lucky to have a battery last just over a year.

If you couple in that Google has the highest security vulnerabilities, is know to crash on a regular basis, and is harder to unload because it spawns more processes, then you will have less than the ideal browser, it is fast but now you know why.

IUt’s worth pointing out that Macs and Linux machines don’t have this problem, because they use something called “tickless timers”. Microsoft might address this problem in the future, but it’s unlikely to be in a rush when other developers seem able to work around the problem.

So, what can be done? Well, not much. This bug was known a long, long time ago, and it’s been raised with Google via its Chromium bug tracker for a long time. It has, for the most part, been ignored. The first report was in 2010. If Google doesn’t take the problem seriously, then the bug will remain, and Windows laptops running Chrome will drain the battery faster than the same machine running Internet Explorer or Firefox.

How can the Internet have too many routes and not enough addresses? As IPv4 runs out of space, attempts to get around the problem could make things even worse

The depletion of Internet addresses would seem to spell relief for aged routers that are struggling to deal with the Internet’s growth, but the complicated interplay between those trends might cause even more problems.

Christmas is coming and no doubt you are cleaning and tidying all ready for visitors? Well there’s an IT Christmas visitor we spoke about yesterday which might just be waiting to pop up.

It’s the cutely named  W97M/Pri.Q which on December the 25th will wipe your system, screw up your data and give you a happy Christmas message below:

Don’t blame the Muslim’s, it might be them or it might be someone who thinks they deserve all the blame – Don’t ask me to comment more.

Is your IT infected?

Only your computer knows the answer to that one, If it is then files will be changed and settings altered, the clock will be ticking and if you do nothing then watch out.

How did I get it?

You received an email probably telling  you that you had received a payment by BACS and the details were contained in a word document or excel spreadsheet attachment and then you opened the document. This then ran a macro, a small routine that disabled your security and anti-virus which started all the bad stuff that is loaded and ready to roll.

What can I do?  

Relax, it’s all OK, we or rather you can sort it all out easily, with our help. Make a backup ring us if you don’t know how, there are hundreds of ways of getting it wrong. Download the free version of Malwarebytes antimalware from www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware and install it. Be sure you have unchecked the trial / premium. Now run a scan using it. If it comes up with problems then you can fix them or ring us for advice. Go to either of the next sites and run a virus sweep. These have the latest detection methods and just download a small package without installing anything on your equipment. Its like having a remote PC smear test.

http://www.eset.co.uk/Antivirus-Utilities/Online-Scanner

(32 bit computers) http://go.trendmicro.com/housecall7/HousecallLauncher.exe

(64 bit computers) http://go.trendmicro.com/housecall7/HousecallLauncher64.exe

Either one is good or both is best. If it comes up clean then you can have a happier Christmas than you may have done.

What is the best anti-virus?

I can talk on this for hours. Basically at the moment ESET either the anti-virus or the Smart Security. Contact us about a free trial.

If you want to know more.

We did a complete page on everything that we do when we have a system to examine. It tells you what happens to an infected system and what to do. Why not subscribe to get all the topical blogs and if you want the latest news then we publish on Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. The links are on the main website, oh!, that link I mentioned is; How do we spring clean your computer for malware, viruses etc?    http://www.cmx.co.uk/blog/2014/06/9.html

On December 25th there will be a nice present for anyone who has opened an email with an attached Word or Excel document. -a dead computer.

If you have received an email like this:

If you open the attachement which is an xls spreadsheet then you will be infected by a virus with the catchy name of W97M/Pri.Q

Here is the definition information. To skip this, it infects your machine, disables everything and then screws up the computer on 25th December;

“W97M/Pri.Q is a polymorphic macro virus operating in the Microsoft Word environment. It uses the “class” method of infection – it attacks the module “ThisDocument” which is present as a standard in each Word document or template. It attacks the global template normal.dot and Word documents. It is derived from the virus W97M/Pri.A and a part of its code comes from the virus W97M/Melissa.A. It is able of spreading also by means of files in an attachment of e-mail messages. After opening an infected document W97M/Pri.Q turns off the Word anti-virus protection and disables displaying of warning on storing the global template and on macros conversion. It also disables adding of documents into the list of the last opened documents. It sets the lowest possible level of Word protection and disables the item Tools/Macro/Security… in the Word menu. It infects the global template and then attacks documents as they are opened and closed. In addition, the virus is able of spreading by means of files in an attachment of e-mail messages. The virus sends its copy to the first 50 addresses from the Microsoft Outlook contacts address book. Subject of such a message is formed by the text Message From the Word user’s name, where instead of the string Word user’s name name of the user to who the program Word is registered is written. The message body is formed by the text “This document is very Important and you’ve GOT to read this !!!“. The name of the file in the attachment is identical with the name of the infected document. The virus marks sending out of its copies by means of e-mail by creating a key in the system registry. In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\ it creates the item CyberNET with value (C)1999 – Indonesia by AnomOke!.”

The virus activating routine is manifested on December 25th. The file autoexec.bat is overwritten by the following code:

@@echo off
@echo Vine…Vide…Vice…Moslem Power Never End…
@echo Your Computer Have Just Been Terminated By -= CyberNET =- Virus !!!
ctty nul
format c: /autotest /q /u

This code causes that disk C: is formatted after the system restart. In the end the virus inserts up to 70 random geometrical shapes in random colours into the active document.