When computer equipment overheats it increases the chances of a crash. Heat (or inadequate heat removal) can even cause long term damage on expensive hardware. You may have noticed that your server room/network closet is a little warmer than the rest of your business. All computer equipment produces heat, and servers are known to pump out a lot of it. Let's talk about ways to keep your important technology cool to prevent crashes and other issues.

Ever since the public has been logging on to the Internet, certain people have been using the Internet to take advantage of others. Whether it be through scams, viruses, malware, phishing, or a whole slew of other dangerous activity, cyber criminals have been very good at making Internet security an industry on its own. With the colossal popularity of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, miscreants are capable of targeting even more users than ever before. On top of that, their methods seem to be hitting people where it hurts. Learn how you can prevent falling into one of their traps.

We talk a lot about smartphones and tablets as business tools, but these days more and more people are using high-end devices personally. It's likely that they are bringing these devices in to work, and often using them to become more productive at their job. We call this Bring-Your-Own-Device, or BYOD, and it isn't a bad thing. The catch is managing security risks when users are using their own personal gadgets.

There are plenty of terrible ways businesses can suffer from data loss; the inevitable failed hard drive, electrical disturbances, human error, viruses, fires, floods, earthquakes - you name it. That's what backup is for, right? If you are running (and managing) a tape backup system, and keeping the backups off site, what could possibly go wrong? Today we investigate one of the leading causes of data loss. It will shock you.

Do you know what others are saying about you online? Keeping track of your online reputation is very important for businesses of any size; and you'd be surprised what people are saying about you.  Using the free service Google Alerts, you can get notifications whenever Google finds something new about you on the internet.

Be aware of the normal functioning pattern of your PC. If it starts acting strange or does something that is not part of its normal routine and isn’t part of scheduled maintenance then you should be on alert, as this could be a sign of a malware issue.

Make sure to install a reliable anti-malware software program and that you update it on a regular basis.

Install a firewall to protect your PC. A firewall is particularly important to PCs that are connected to the internet for long hours as this will help prevent a large percentage of Malware attacks.

Use an email client that employs a spam filter. This is because a lot of Trojans and other viruses are spread over the internet by using email as a medium. Email clients that have a spam filter will help provide protection for your computer. However, for complete email protection we would recommend an offsite filter such as Reflexion’s email security service. Contact us for more info about Reflexion.

Plenty of our clients use Remote Desktop to access a terminal server or use their workstation from an off-site location. Depending on your connection and the speed of all of the devices in question, remote work can either be pretty seamless or a laggy, sluggish endeavor if your Remote Desktop client isn’t configured correctly. If you are running into a situation where you type something on your keyboard and it takes several long seconds for it to show up, these tweaks can improve performance and reduce input delays.

First you’ll want to open the Remote Desktop Client. You can find that under Programs > Accessories on the Start Menu. Click on Remote Desktop and then click Options on the window that comes up.

1. Let’s start with the Display tab. Turn the color depth down to 16-bit (or lower, if you aren’t doing anything that involves a lot of colors). If you are working with images or colors are too distorted to work, bump it back up to 16-bit, but the higher the color settings are, the slower your connection will be.

2. On the Local Resources tab, adjust your Audio settings. By default, sound that occurs on the workstation you remote into will broadcast over to the one you are sitting at. If you don’t want it to, you can disable it. Just keep in mind, if you run your email client on the remote location, you won’t hear the email notification sound.

3. Also on the Local Resources tab, you can disable printers. Doing this will prevent you from printing to the remote location, so if you do need to print, skip this. If you don’t need to print, this can solve quite a few slowness issues, especially when you first remote in.

Click on the Experience tab and uncheck all of the options except Bitmap caching. This may diminish some of the flashier windows effects, but saves a ton of bandwidth that you don’t really need to give up to work productively.

Now Connect like you would normally (back on the General tab) and you should things should be running faster!

While search engines aren't as frustrating as they were in the late 90's. Searching for something can still be a time consuming task if you don't know how to use the tools available to you in search engines that can cut down the amount of time you'll spend searching. Google is similar to a library's catalog, except you're not searching through thousands of books; instead you are searching through millions upon millions of websites. How do you sift through this giant pile of information to find what you need? Learning a few simple techniques can help you find the information you need fast.

Google is by far the most popular search engine, so let's go over some specific tricks to improve the results you get. The broader your search, the more results you will get, and the less likely you will get the exact info you need. For example, searching for dogs will result in a high number of search results (577 million), whereas searching for house training multiple dogs narrows the search down to less than 1 million. Google (and the other leading search engines) will put the most relevant content on top of the results, so the more specific you are, the better results you will get. There are several ways of narrowing search results. However, before we get into those we need to go over a few basic rules first.

Punctuation and Case Sensitivity

Punctuation doesn't count, and capitalization won't change your results.

Ten Words or Less

Google limits search queries to ten words. Anything after the 10th word is truncated and ignored. You'll want to be as specific as possible without going over ten words, which brings us to the next rule:

Word Order

The order of the words you search for matter. Google assumes the first word you search for is the most important, followed by the second and the third and so-forth.

Even following these rules might not get you the results you want immediately. Remember, the goal isn't to sift through the thousands of pages of results to find what you want, it's to get the result you want on the first couple of pages. The better you search, the less time you'll spend searching. Here are some tricks to improve your results.

Use Quotes (but not all the time)

If you want to search for a specific set of words or phrase, put quotations around them. Just remember, searching for "william gates" may exclude sites that only mention the Microsoft founder as Bill Gates. These days, quotes can help narrow things down when you just can't find what you are looking for, but typically word order eliminates the need for quotes much of the time.

Use a Wildcard

If you want Google to fill in the blanks for you, use an asterix (*) as a wildcard. Searching for "Where art * Romeo" will assume you are looking for Where art thou Romeo. If you remember a phrase but can't piece together all of the words, using this method can greatly increase your chances of finding the missing pieces.

Plus (+), Minus (-), AND or OR

If you want to search exactly what you type, use the +. Google will often try to guess what you mean, so if you type cake+chocolate Google will be forced to return results that have the term chocolate after the word cake. Using the minus sign will exclude results. Searching for recipes cake -chocolate will bring up cake recipes that don't contain chocolate. Using AND tells Google that the order doesn't matter, as long as the page has both terms, where OR will let you get more results. Searching recipes cake chocolate OR crab will give you an odd assortment of chocolate cake and crab cake recipes, but you see the point.

These are just some of the neat tricks you can do in a Google search to narrow down your results. Stay tuned to our blog next month, where we will provide even more cool Google tricks to make your life easier (and maybe a bit more entertaining), as well as more IT technology tricks, tips, and advice from your Chicago IT experts at LTS.

Cans of compressed air are no stranger to many households today. They can be used in a variety of different ways, but, most notably, they can be used to perform light maintenance on your computer. Whether you use a laptop or a desktop, a can of air can clean parts of your computer that, if left unchecked, could lead to costly repairs.

Dust is one of the leading causes of hardware malfunction for computer equipment. Dust can blanket the heat-producing components and restrict airflow, trapping enough heat to cause damage. Fans and vents can get clogged which will prevent your device from cooling properly, which can drastically reduce the life of your technology.

The solution? A cheap can of compressed air can be used to clean case fans or laptop vents. These parts are prone to getting clogged up with dust, hair, pet fur and other assorted debris. The more clogged these get, the less air flow those heat-generating components receive. Less air flow means more heat on the inside which could cause your computer to overheat in any number of places or, in extreme instances, can even damage some hardware and require a replacement. To avoid this, just clean out your fans and vents with some canned air. If possible, you will want to open up the computer first so you can blow the dust out of the machine rather than into it. While you have the machine open, you should use some of the canned air on your power supply as well.

Additionally, many CPUs and VGAs come with heat sinks or fans to keep them cool while your computer is running. Let these go too long without some cleaning and you may have to buy some new hardware. A good indication of how dirty your fans are is how loud they are. A clean fan is generally much quieter than one that is layered with dust. If your computer starts sounding louder than usual, you may want to try carefully blasting away some of that debris.

Finally, a can of air can be quite useful in cleaning your external devices like your mouse and keyboard. If you use a roller ball mouse, you can clean the inside where the ball stays as well as underneath the mouse buttons themselves. If you use an optical mouse, you only need to clean under the buttons. Keyboards are more prone to collecting debris than a mouse is. When cleaning these out, you will want to hold the keyboard upside down and allow gravity to help you out a bit. Removing debris and dust from under your keyboard and mouse buttons won't save you any costly repair bills, but it should help to ensure that you don't get any of your buttons stuck.

A can of air is a very useful tool for all computer owners to have. They are easy to use and easy to store. If you keep your computer dust free, it will only serve to help you in the long run. Why spend hundreds of dollars on new hardware every other year when a few dollars on a can of air can extend your computer's life.

If your computer is in an environment that has a lot more dust than the norm, you may want to invest in some specialized case add-ons or a breathable dust filter to protect your investment. Be sure to remember, if you do open up your computer to dust it, there are a lot of sensitive components in there; do so at your own risk. It never hurts to contact us at LTS every 6 months or so if it looks like your computers are picking up a lot of dust. Of course, our technicians are equipped with compressed air when they do go on site in order to dust out any workstation or server they open up.