If it’s not people trying the fool you into a webpage that pretends to “scan” your computer for virus and find 100 Cirtical Objects that need removing through their software , only after the unknowing user installs the software they are constantly harrased by popups!

It’s people from India calling you up after getting your name and number out of the telephone directory and pretending to be your ISP or Microsoft saying you have issues on your machine that they will need to fix.
A site F1Compstepuk.com ( Now shutdown by HostGator ) which charged you £185 after install teamviewer so the person could remotely access your machine “and remove the virus’” which had been causing your computer slowness and even 404 Errors!

From Microsoft’s Own Website

“Microsoft does not make unsolicited phone calls to help you fix your computer

In this scam cybercriminals call you and claim to be from Microsoft Tech Support. They offer to help solve your computer problems. Once the crooks have gained your trust, they attempt to steal from you and damage your computer with malware including viruses and spyware.

Although law enforcement can trace phone numbers, perpetrators often use pay phones, disposable cellular phones, or stolen cellular phone numbers. It’s better to avoid being conned rather than try to repair damage afterwards.

Treat all unsolicited phone calls with skepticism. Do not provide any personal information.”

So guys, make sure you recognise the number and you know the person logging in remotely to your machine!

Gardian Article Here

Estate Agents and real estaters are heavily reliant on IT Systems and the need to keep an up-to-date database of properties and clients contact details. Tasks such as printing residential contracts and the auditing of signing and archiving until the tenancy or property sale goes through put a quite high demand on IT Support. This also puts heavy strain on printing requirements and we work directly with industrial print companies such as Canon to make sure the company gets the best deal and support contract with their printers. This not only heavily reduces the overall cost per page but allows constant printer support throughout the week.

Estate Agents will usually have multiple offices in different counties and cities. Agents will need to hot desk in between each office as well as be able to upload and download information while on the road. The installation and set-up of a Terminal Server has been the best practice for this, as data can be consolidated into one office and backuped daily. If the user base exceeds 50-100 Users we would recommend you colocate your server to a Data Center on an internet connection of 100mb/s to meet the speed demand. Remote Desktop Connections support full USB mapping so agents can upload pictures direct from a digital camera  to a Content Management System while on the road.

We are always looking for ways to improve the workflow and flexibility of software for estate agents, and after demoing http://www.aspasia.net/ , we are really impressed on how this provides total growth and flexibility as will as a mobile phone application which is perfect for upload pictures on the road as well as adding and editing information

It’s rare but exciting to see some software come out to make a technicans life and users faster. When a computer itially starts, it starts up a load of applications in the background so when you do actually run the program it’s already waiting in the background so it opens faster in principle. However this does lead to a longer bootup time, and sometime you will only open the application once every few months. For example Adobe Reader, Blackberry Desktop Manager and Mircosoft Office Groove and the examples of the programs I stripped out of my boottime. Adobe Reader isn’t even my default PDF Viewer, Desktop Manager only needs to be used for the backup and switching of blackberrys and I don’t use Groove. Granted anyone who knows there way round a computer could of done this by looking in the Startup Folder, MS Config and even the low level registry however there has been no clear way before, to time how long each of these applications add onto your total boot time! Not only do they hinder the normal startup task of your computer but they also increase your memory useage of your computer, for some this can cause issues!

Welcome Soluto, a simple tool which you install , restart your computer , and it gives you a nice run down of what’s running at startup , how long it takes and useful advice of if you should pause items in startup or delay them. The software’s in beta and ready to download here

There is one issue I have found, installing Soluto, means it will need to run every startup , and at it states through it’s logging , it takes 5 seconds to boot. I hope this software/company will start adding some more features and functions to their software!

Office 2010 has just arrived at MSDN so we have all upgraded our betas to full versions! This post was going to start as a post about Office 2010 , but theres too much to add so I will start with the main day to day tool Outlook 2010

Since Netcaptor first introduced it, till Microsoft recognised this easy method of changing windows , Office Tabbed viewing has been the best way to browse around your application. At last we see this brought into it’s full effect in Office. There’s been careful though of all the ribbons and there icons , and I can tell how easy the tranisation will be for users and also show them features in office they never knew existed.

The main file menu brings up useful information like your Email Mailbox storage limits, Out of Office, Account settings and even a Webmail link ! This was a really smart idea, I know it will take strain off of IT Managers when there’s an issue with outlook and a user can just go through webmail without any phonecall needed!

If someone emails a calendar appoitment that conflicts with an existing appoitment, not only will it tell you this , but it automatically brings up the conflicting appoitment in your email view for you to rearrange or cancel.

Outlook 2010 has been built around it’s social connect feature , syncing your contacts with well known social networks. It comes off the shelf supporting LinkedIn , the Business Social network and …… MYSPACE !!!??? I guess this is Microsoft is keen to develop the email and work collaboration for Schools as the average MySpace user is less than 24 .

Really suprised there is no off the shelf facebook intergration, LinkedIn ( all be it business minded ) has been very slow off the start with some of its features such as adding pictures and syncronising contacts with mobile devices …. I’m really suprised about the lack of the worlds most used social networking site Facebook even if it is mainly used out of work, there still is a strong place for it inside the corporate world due to it’s information and users. Even more confused about the missing Windows LIVE  intergration , I can only presume something fancy is going on with Mircosoft Communictor

MailTips – MailTips is a new tool that will:

- Warns you when you are about to send an email to a distribution list , and lists the total number of reciepents

- Warns you when composing a new message, that the user in your organisation is Out of the Office and will show you their “out of office message”

- Warns you if the message you are about to send will be going to a mailbox that is full or even that will push you over your quota limit saving you time and unnecessary emails!

- Warns you when you have been copied in on an email and you choose to reply to all. Replying to all will let all the other recipents you have been copied in on the email in the first place!

- Warns you when you compose a new email and the recipients are a mix of people internally and externally to the company

I would of really liked to see this mail tip : http://sites.google.com/site/markbird/ , Thunderbird has is it now and we’ve all do to the end of an email without attaching!

MailTips do require Exchange 2007 , which you should have by now with this version of Microsoft Office!

Alas , you can’t please everyone, and I do agree with them about being still upset about Microsoft Word being used as the offical email editor in Outlook. Many a time I have had to modify or fix HTML pages created by Word, this needs to be fixed for the benifit of document collaboration and the move over to Office Web Applications

Unfortuneatly McAfee Total Protection Antivirus users recently experienced an update forcing them offline. This is a known fault where Mcafee Anti Virus Scanner with update “5958 DAT” classes the standard Windows XP svchost.exe which checks the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it must load as w32/wecorl.a Virus.

Not having this will seriously affect programs on start-up, force your taskbar at the bottom not to load and remove any network connections

To get you taskbar back up right click the line at the bottom of your screen where it is usually at and then select Toolbars, Quick Launch.

A few of our home users have has this issue with their home machines. Macafee’s solution is to copy a svchost.exe from C:\Windows\System32\DllCache\ however , Mcafee has also deleted svchost from this!

To resolve this issue download a clean working SVCHOST.EXE from here , ( You will need to unzip)

http://rapidshare.com/files/379323325/svchost.zip

Boot the system into safe mode ( Tap F8 when the PC first starts)  , once booted into safemode ( Click Yes on the warning,  Don’t try system restore , no chance without svchost.exe ) Delete the DAT folder located

C:\Program Files\McAfee\VirusScan\

This will paralyse Mcafee , until you can get back on-line

Copy the working svchost.exe to C:\Windows\System32 . Drag and drop copy will not work not work , so you will need to use the command prompt ( Start , Run , CMD ) and the copy command “copy *Replace me with location of file*svchost.exe C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe

e.g. copy D:\Svchost.exe C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe

Restart , and your back and working! , Download the new replacement updates!

Executable for updates is here

We recommend and utilise Kapersky Antirus , so if your one of our customers your protected and online!

We are pleased to announce a new Response IT record install time of 36 Hours from the initial client meeting to a Small Business 2008 Install with 5 Client Computers. We know the IT issues faced when starting up a new company, we’ve been through the process many times , and have the install method down to the fine art! We can help guide you through the set-up of your Internet Connection, Phone System, Website, Server and any other pre requisites. After sign off , new equipment will be waiting at your door the next day with an engineer eagerly waiting to set it all up for you! With enough to worry about starting up a new company, pass your IT start-up headaches to us , and we’ll do the rest!

IT support is important for many business, but Accountants have a daily need for support with their bespoke and off the shelf products and updates. Some main products we have helped our clients with are

Sage – Sage has updates every year via disk. Not only does this update the client that reads the Sage company files , but it also upgrades the Company Sage Files. This means that each user in the company will need to have their client upgraded as well as each of the company files the Accountants manage. This is not an easy task to perform in-house and can add allot of downtime to users. We do this out of hours where as possible to keep systems up throughout the day and deadlines!

IRIS Exchequer – Used by large companies for Project Costings and Business intelligence , we have rolled this out through Terminal Services Remote App which means a user can access this through an HTTP remote login.

IRIS Payroll – Another product from IRIS , however also used by small to medium companies with their payroll tasks. When it gets down to the end of the months , there will be hell to pay if this isn’t running!

Quickbooks – Another popular tool used by Small Business’ for invoice management , we have system to make sure that the database gets backed up regularly to multiple locations.

Excel  - The main number crunching / figure analysis tool on the market for most accountants. Most of the time we can train people how to perform specific tasks with their data e.g. Vlookup or just make sure the files they are opening and saving are the correct data type.

HM Revenue & Customs: Employer CD-ROM – The Employer CD-ROM contains most of the guidance you will need to help you run your payroll throughout the year including. This not only provides guidance but can store data which will need to be migrated when a user moves computer

MYOB – Mind your Own Business – An all inclusive package which can manage your accounts as well as a CRM and ERP

Accountants data is precious , especially with the laws stating it is your responsibility to keep your VAT records and details for 6 years. Not only does data have to be archived for this length of  time , but also emails. Thankfully the stress of this is taken away from the user and us , with Microsoft’s Hosted Archiving solution.

Most work with accounts is still on Paper Documents , this adds up to storage problems which can be solved by expensive offsite secure storage. However , sometimes this isn’t secure enough! Accountants require industrial scanners to batch scan documents and input them into document systems in a standardised format! We have supported numerous scanners/digital senders and document managers.

We are pleased the announce to sucessful migration of one small business 2003 domain , and two active directory standard 2003 domains into a 2008 Active Directory Forest. All together there was a total of 300 + Users and Computers to be migrated over the course of a 2 month period. The new 2008 Domain was setup by Response-IT which runs on a fully redundant VMWare ESX platform across 3 sites with three Storage Area Networks and 9 Physical Servers across the sites. Not only did all the User machines migrate  across sucessfully as well as all the user accounts with their Active Directory Permissions and Exchange 2007 Calendar/Mailbox permissions, but we also had sucess in the full migration of all the Group Policy Security settings.

The migration also involved an upgrade From Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 , an implementation of a global Distrubuted File System and a VPN Cisco Mesh between all three sites. We also upgraded the sites Blackberry Enterprises Servers from Version 4 to Version 5 without the need for users individual blackberrys to be migrated manually. Due the moving away from Small Business Server’s Remote Webworkplace we setup Windows Server 2008 Web Access which not only allows users to access Outlook over the terminal services Remote App Interface, but they also can login to a terminal Server or their own computer. This was a very easy step to get remote workers migrated as easily as possible either back to their machine @ work or to the new Terminal Server.

End users were migrated painlessly using the Active Directory Migratation wizard which modified the permissions on their local profiles so they could be accessed on the new domains. Each user was migrated in under 10 minutes due to a carefully planned migration checklist as well as lengthy testing to ensure the ends users got back their machines quickly and without major modifications.

Overall the migration was a huge sucess for Response IT and ADS!

Wow are we excited about this new server 2008 version! After much testing in house, as soon as Windows 7 was released, we have been giving it the green light and rolling it out to customers sites. So far the feedback is better than expected with customers straight away, wanting to change the whole office into Windows 7! With Windows 2008 Server R2 being based on the same Windows NT 6.1 core, it can only mean one thing!

So what does Windows Server 2008 R2 mean for you as a customer?

Direct Access

We are big believers of Outlook over HTTP! There is nothing easier, when a mobile worker can just connect to an internet connection and open outlook straight off to receive emails securely. For some countries who block VPN due to web censoring , this sometimes is the only way! Direct Access brings this technology to everything else you connect to the server with , mainly file access. This means no more VPN’s , which means direct out the box file access and secure authentication with Windows 7

Terminal Server

Service 2008 R2 handling of remote sessions is getting better than ever. Not only can it stream live Windows Media Player through the connection , you can also record audio off a remote desktop connection! The same technology enables utilisation of the Windows Aero Theme through RDP enabling a seamless RDP Intergration with the users Desktop. It also supports Dual Monitors for the first time with Windows 7 and  RDP 7

Branch Office Cache

If you are like many of our customers , then you might have different branches your workforce work from. The need to collaborate files can always seem slow as they are based out of a main office usually with only a 2mb leased line. Thanks to Branch Office Cache, files that are accessed once from a branch office , will be cached on the server, so the next time the file needs to be accessed again , it will be instant. This caching can cache HTTP (e.g. Sharepoint) or SMB ( Normal File Access )

A client who has a video editing studio came to us with a problem. Their need for content had risen dramatically due to Social Networking sites such as YouTube , Facebook and MySpace. This means they were making even more content to keep up with demand, however with this generation they where finding problems with their existing setup. They were using a Mac for the editing , creation and then backup of material. The Mac had only come with 1Terabyte of Storage so they had to purchase external usb drives to archive data off until they archived it onto tape. When data needed to be archived off onto tape this added strain to the Mac and the machine couldn’t be used for editing. The Mac Software also did not utilise backup appending to media which means tape archiving was getting difficult to manage.

To resolve this issue we installed a Fully Redundant Drobo Elite with a 7 Terabyte Array ( 1 Terabyte for Redundancy) . This is dynamically growable to 13 Terabytes when the Client runs out of space. This Drobo Elite is connected to the Mac and another Windows 2008 Server machine with Backup Exec using an NTFS Share via a 1 Gigabyte iSCSI network. So far the results have proved amazing. Uncompressed High Definition Video can be streamed directly from the Drobo to the Mac for Editing, and the Windows Machine can backup the contents to Tape without reducing the Mac’s performance for Video Editing.