telanova Blog

telanova: the outsourced IT team that feels like your own

Providing advice, consultancy, helpdesk, monitoring and maintenance, updates, upgrades, security: all the things your in-house team would do, but better and at a fraction of the cost and hassle.

PCs and laptops are too complex and troublesome

Details: Created: Sunday, 28 October 2012; Written by Warwick Grigg

For most people, PCs and laptops are too complex, too troublesome and too expensive, especially now you can offload so much to the cloud. Why waste time on antivirus, backup, drivers, service packs, upgrades etc? I've been keeping my eye on Chromebooks since they were launched a couple of years ago. Four weeks ago a new Chromebook came out, the Samsung series 3, and I just had to buy one. I love it: it starts up in just 8 seconds, it's as light as a feather, silent, runs six hours on battery, all for just £200+VAT.

When broadband isn't fast enough

Details: Created: Thursday, 25 October 2012; Written by Warwick Grigg

The reality of broadband internet speeds doesn't live up to advertisers' headline rates. The upstream rate, for information flowing from your servers at HQ to people working remotely, is only 5% of the headline downstream rate, and the downstream rate is less than 1% of the speed of your local network. As a company grows with more people working from home, or working at other offices, what do you do next?

Need a new server? Maybe not!

Details: Created: Wednesday, 29 June 2011; Written by Warwick Grigg

Starting a small business three years ago, with 3 or more people, a Windows Small Business Server was a compelling proposition: quality software the big boys use for a bargain price. There wasn't anything else that would give you centralised mailboxes, calendars and contacts. But if you'd done that you'd be looking at replacing that server now or soon; and spending the same money again and a bit more.

Buy Apple Mac instead of HP or Dell?

Details: Created: Thursday, 30 August 2012; Written by Warwick Grigg

Now Apple is the most valuable company of all time, is this a signal to buy an Apple Mac for my business network instead of an HP or Dell running Windows?

If Sage or any PC application runs slow

Details: Created: Wednesday, 27 October 2010; Written by Warwick Grigg

If Sage, or any other application, starts to run slowly you may not need to replace your computer just yet. Our accountant customers sometimes get this problem when they've loaded a lot of data into Sage, and Sage has to process it all. Although you can buy a new faster computer for £500, the total cost including new software licences, installation, configuration and data transfer works out much higher. What can you do to delay the purchase for another year or two?