Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Recent research by hardware manufacturer Intel (and supported by the Confederation of British Industry) has highlighted the lack of investment and expertise in IT in small businesses in the UK. Their study of 3000 IT decision makers for businesses of 250 users or less shows:

• the majority still use fax machines more than smart phones
• a large percentage expose themselves to security risks by using personal laptops and mobile devices for work and are unaware of the data protection rules they’re potentially breaking by doing so
• most did not know what ‘the cloud’ is, even those that were using it already (e.g via Gmail)

There were several other worrying facts relating to investment in IT equipment (a third do not intend to buy new laptops or tablets for at least a year) and security (two thirds spend under 10% of their IT budget on protecting against attacks).

It’s disappointing that in this digital age many small businesses still do not appreciate the efficiency improvements that can be attained by updating IT infrastructure or the importance of maintaining IT security. At Glo Networks we are proud that none of our customers fall into this group (and those that may have previously have had our help to make the required improvements). Don’t let your business your business be one of those stuck in the IT ‘dark age’!

Posted by James in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops, General, Hardware, Laptop Hardware, Mobile, Servers, Small Business Software | No Comments »

Always trying to do our little bit to help the planet (as per our news article here) we’ve been running a little bit of software called Dynamic Energy Saver 2 on one of our test servers. It’s a (overly)graphical bit of software that effectively powers back all the major components in your PC / Server when they’re not needed. You don’t need to power it off or do anything to it when you want to use your PC in vengeance, it just lets everything run as fast as is needed. The interesting thing is that we didn’t expect it to do much at all however check the screen shot !

Yup that’s a 1Kw saving over a 50 day period on one box. Scale that up through your infrastructure and you could be looking at some serious savings. It’s effectively a piece of software that can save you money.

It only works on certain Gigabyte motherboards but is definitely worth a quick download and install.

Gigabyte’s page on the software can be found here.
And the software itself can be found half way down this page.

Posted by Chris in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops | 1 Comment »

It seems what was left of Microsoft’s diminishing lead in market capitalisation has finally been eaten up by Apple (or at least by one measure of market capitalization). While this probably will not come as a surprise to those who are interested in such things; when looking at the history of both companies it does mark an important milestone.

With both companies founded in 1975 this has been no short journey for either. However since that time Microsoft has maintained its dominance pretty much consistently, and it has only really been in the last 10 years (which has seen the release of such iconic Apple products as the iPod, iPhone and the Macbook) that Apple providing a challenge to Microsoft’s market supremacy.

Through out the ’00′s Apple  created several iconic, genre leading products with which Microsoft have seemed to struggled to compete . Business products aside, we would challenge you to offer a Microsoft product in the last 5 years that rivals Apples innovation. One possible exception worth considering is the Xbox 360, which was  ground breaking in terms of online connectivity when released in 2005. That said Apple have yet to enter the console gaming market!

More information and figures can be found in the following articles: Engadget, Financial Times, TGDaily

Posted by James in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops, Laptop Hardware, Operating Systems, Software | No Comments »

So there’s now quite an uptake of SSDs in all manor of devices. And a few of us in the office have them in our devices. Every now and then the SSDs need firmware updating and the OS / image re-applying. More interesting though is the Windows 7 TRIM support offered by most current SSDs. TRIM support is needed to keep your SSD running as it’s optimum performance (which of course is why you bought it in the first place), however does anyone actualy know if it’s working ? Apparently running this from a command prompt will tell you -

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

If it returns 0 then it is on in Windows.

However that test really isn’t any use as run it on any Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2 server and you get 0 returned. So apparently it’s on and working on standard HDs also ? ! ? Also spotted this on the internet -

1. Right click on a disk drive, go to properties.
2. Select the Tools tab and click on Defragment now…
3. Click on Configure schedule…
4. Click on Select disks…
5. The SSD should not show up in the list of disks if Windows recognizes it as an SSD.

Amazes me that there’s obviously a lot of money being invested into SSD and rightly so as they do have obvious benifits. However if having TRIM support on your SSD is really that important then there should be some real way to check it’s working. Or is TRIM support just marketing hype and doing nothing ?

Anyone have the real answer ?

PS. Could all end user devices be exclusively SSD powered in the next few years with all bulk storage only done in the cloud or on your corperate servers ?

Posted by Chris in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops | No Comments »

Accidents in the workplace happen all the time. In our world it’s usually limbs getting caught in racks, cases and clips. Unfortunately every now and then something really bad will happen and a bit of kit gets dropped.

In this case one of our staff dropped a PC (an IBM ThinkCentre) directly onto a Macbook Pro (3,1). Fearing the worst the PC was brushed aside[1] and we hurriedly opened the Macbook Pro. Surprisingly everything was still working. The screen isn’t broken. The keyboard is fine. Infact, it woke up from sleep seconds after the incident with no issues at all.

Similar things have happened in the office in the past, and invariably the laptop/phone/hand/foot has been completely destroyed, with a nerdy missle sticking comically out of it.

So there you go, another reason to buy Apple laptops. Other than looking cool in coffee shops and meetings.

Naturally the member of staff involved was immediately put to death for such carelessness.

[1] IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre’s are built like tanks, which is why we still love IBM and Lenovo PCs.

Posted by Karl in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops, General, Laptop Hardware | No Comments »