The newly unveiled productivity suite from Microsoft, Office 2013, won't be running on older operating systems like Windows XP and Vista it has been revealed.

Office 2013 is said to be only compatible with PCs, laptops or tablets that are running on the latest version of Windows i.e. either Windows 7 or not yet released Windows 8. So if you are still running an old IT system like XP you will need to upgrade.

According to a systems requirements page for Microsoft for Office 2013 customer preview, the Office 2010 successor is only compatible with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012.

This was confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. Further the minimum requirements states that systems need to be equipped with at least a 1 GHz processor and should have 1 GB of RAM for 32-bit systems or 2 GB for 64-bit hardware. All of the current new computers will have no problem with this.

The minimum storage space that should be available is 3 GB along with a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card for users wanting hardware acceleration.

If you are thinking of using Microsoft Office 2013 you may need to upgrade your computers and software. If you do or if you are not sure why not contact iPing

Latest news on Windows 8 is that it will include a reset and refresh button. The reset button will set your computer to the state it was when it was just installed. The refresh button will restore the Windows install to the out of the box state whilst keeping all of your documents and personally installed computer programs intact.

This is great news for anyone who is involved in computer support and also anyone who needs to have their computers supported as it should speed up the resolution time to get a computer from broken to working and less time spent fixing computers means savings for everyone.

One great use of the reset button for anyone looking to sell a computer or pass it on to another department is you just have to click the reset and your computer will be at a working state without all of your sensitive data on it.

Word of advice though don’t get reset and refresh mixed up.

If you want any advice on your IT strategy please contact iPing.

We are living in a knowledge era, where everyone is so dependent on technology and requires their IT to work at all times. Given these requirements, just how fast should your IT service company respond to your calls?

In the past, IT service companies have given Next Business Day (NBD) support and this was OK for something that you were able to put off doing for a while. The scenario here is the customer logs the call at some point during the day and the IT service company comes out the next day to fix the problem. A service like this will be acceptable if a problem is just affecting say one person and the problem is not mission critical.

Also quite common on the market is four hour support services where the IT service company will respond to your call within four business hours. Quite alot of the time this can feel like/be NBD support depending on the time of day that you log the call.

Here at iPing we strive to provide a one hour response to our customers as we know how important your business is to you and how important your IT is to your business. If you do not feel like you are getting a fast enough IT service from your current IT provider please give us a call.

If you are responsible for IT Services in your company then data backup is something that you regularly need to think about.

You may just be responsible for calling your IT provider if a problem occurs and if this is the case you need to ask your IT provider regularly about your data backup.

A company's data is just too important not to back up. Recent research from Garther states that 75% of companies go out of business after having a major data loss.

Out of all the backup options available at present, online backup options are proving the most popular as it takes the human element out of the backup process hence reducing the risk .

How online backup works:

• A programme is installed on the computers you want to back-up;
• This programme is pointed to the information that needs to be backed up (daily, weekly etc);
• The programme will copy this information onto a secure server that is based on the Internet.

This means your information is backed up in a different location to where you operate which protects you against fire hazards and the theft of your data.

Most times the excuses I hear are "the person who looked after the backup tapes left the company", or often times the person looks at me for a minute before saying, 'I was supposed to be doing that'. So the next time you are talking to your IT provider ask them about the pros and cons of using an online backup solution on your network. Like all questions, it is the questions that are not asked that are the stupid ones.

Your data is important so be sure to back it up.

In this blog, I am going to look at a really useful method that can be used to help show your IT service provider the problems you are having, without them having to attand your office or connect to your computer.

The feature of Windows 7 that we are going to look at is called Problem Step Recorder or PSR for short.  One of the many functions of PSR is documenting problems that you are having and showing your IT services provider the sequence of events that are leading up to the problem.

How PSR works:

Click on the windows button on the bottom left hand corner of your screen and type in PSR in the search area. This will give you the option to click on Record steps to reproduce a problem, click on this See fig1.

This will open up the Problem Step Recorder program for you. You can have this open any time when you are working. Once you want to start recording the process that you want to show your IT services company you click on the start recording button see fig2.

Now every time that you click your mouse on something your computer will make note of it. Your computer will keep making note of everything that you do until you click the stop recording button.

You can also add comments to the recording for your IT services company and this will help speed up resolving those computer problems that are sometimes hard to replicate when the IT support company are not in your office for you to show how they are happening.

If you have any questions or comments on this we would like to hear them. You can contact iPing IT Services here.

Project Requirements: The aim of this project was to assemble the fastest graphic’s processing PC for a photographer client of ours. The requirements were:

1. The computer had to be as quiet as possible
2. It has to be able to run 24/7 365 days a year
3. And it also had to maximise every euro of our client’s budget

For our client this was a very big investment and therefore we needed to be completely sure that our client was completed happy with the computer we supplied.

Originally our client was looking at the likes of the DELL Workstation T7500 and the HP Z600 and these computers were ranging in price anywhere from €3,600 - €6,000 excluding VAT as of January 2012.

We looked closely at the specs for the Dell T7500 and came to the conclusion that this computer was running on previous generation CPU that offered a lower performance to the current high end CPUs. The memory was very expensive and had relatively slow performance for graphical jobs. Furthermore the hard disk, although a good size at 2 terabytes, was too slow based on what is currently available in the IT market.

Solution:

We came to the conclusion after examining current offerings on the market, that it made the most sense to offer our client a custom built computer. This meant we could match our client’s custom requirements exactly thereby meeting all of their requirements and also future proofing his investment. We offered various options in relation to all of the components of the computer with the pros and cons of each option. Then we helped our client to decide which cost effective combination would deliver the highest performance and this was based on what would let our client render the most pictures and videos per day.

Tech Talk

For the technical minded people out there here is the solution that we put together for our client and some of the thoughts behind each decision:

CPU = Intel 3930K

As of the end of January 2012, the fastest performing desktop CPU on the planet is the Intel 3960X. It runs at 3.3GHz, is armed with 15 megabytes of cache memory for the 6 cores, and it is able to handle 12 simultaneous threads. This CPU costs around €1,100 and this is the reason that we chose the just released little brother of the 3960 the Intel 3930K.

The feature set of the two CPU’s is very similar 3.3GHz vs 3.2GHz, 15MB cache vs 12MB, with the same 6 cores and 12 threads.  The fact that this PC would be used for graphical design and rendering and the price difference between them was between €500 and €550 euros made this decision easy. From studying the benchmarks of the two CPUs, we were happy with choosing the Intel 3930K knowing that there would not be any major performance implications based on the customer’s requirements and guidelines to us.

Motherboard = Asus P9X79 pro

The Asus P9X79 pro makes use of the Intel X79 chipset and this is the latest and most feature rich chipset that Intel currently have, that meets our customer’s requirements. Some of the reasons for choosing to go with the P9X79 were its best in class power efficiency and the ability to have 8 memory modules.

Memory = 32 GB Corsair Vengeance 2000MHz

The motherboard we chose is able to handle 8 memory modules instead of 4 like the earlier models. In this case, this choice was very useful because we could choose 8 pieces of very fast Corsair Vengeance 2000MHz 4Gbyte modules instead of the slower and much more expensive (about double the price!) 8Gbyte 1600MHz modules to reach the 32Gigs.

Graphics Card = PNY Quadro 4000

The customer requested that we use a Nvidia Quadro graphics card in this system. This was the card we agreed would be good for the type of graphic intensive work that our client needed to be able to do. We chose the affordable PNY Quadro 4000 with 2 Gigabytes of memory as it fitted their needs and requirements. Most computers these days use less than 2 gigs of memory all together, so having 2 gigabytes of memory on the video card dedicated to video and graphic editing will make an astounding difference.

The 2 gigabytes of memory on the graphics card and also the 32 gigabytes of memory in the system require a 64bits operating system.  For this reason we chose Windows 7 professional 64bit as the operating system.

Working files & Operating System Storage = 256 Gigabyte Corsair SSD

At the moment Solid State Disks (SSDs) are all the rage in the computer work and IT suppliers really like them.  You may ask why? The reason is they are fully electronic i.e. they have no moving parts. Old disks have heads that move to read the data and this makes them slower than the SSD. The SSD currently can be up to 100 times faster than the traditional hard disk. This is the main reason that we selected an SSD disk for the operating system, the second reason was the type of files that our client will be working on. In the future the client can also add another SSD to this configuration in a RAID 0 configuration and this will give him another performance boost if required.

Archive Storage = Western Digital 7200RPM 2 Terabyte HDD

The one problem with the SSD compared to traditional disks is the storage size is smaller than the default 1 TB / 2 TB disks that come as standard in computers these days. To get around this we advised the client to put one of these disks into the computer to enable big jobs to be archived onto it once work had been finished on them. Then, if he needs to work on the job again he can move it back onto the fast SSD for production.

File Backup = Online Backup & USB disk

We set the computer up with an online backup system to back up all of the critical files on the computer. This lets the customer leverage the power of cloud storage. We also suggested that he back up every month to a 2TB external USB disk so as to have a local backup. Having the local backup will speed up the recovery time should we need to recover everything from the online backup as we will only have to recover at most one month’s files from the online backup.

Test Test Test

After finishing the build and install all of the required software we stress tested every part of the system and then tested the whole computer. We ran a burn test that put the CPU, GPU and the memory to 100% of its capacity. We let this test run for 115 hours (almost 5 days!) while constantly monitoring all speeds, voltages and temperatures. This test ran without fault and was exactly what we required to give our customer peace of mind in their purchase.

The noise level of this PC is another highlight that we are proud of and it is barely audible even under heavy load. This is thanks to the huge and slow fans on the industrial cooler and the high-end power supply.

Final thoughts

Considering that this computer cost around €2,700 to custom build, we saved our customer thousands of euros compared to the original Dell and HP computers that he was looking at and we got a computer that was at least 20% faster.

At the moment there is no upgrade for the CPU and Intel has not released any updates on this yet. This PC has the potential to have its CPU overclock without any modifications thanks to the carefully chosen parts. It is currently running at its stock speed of 3.2 GHz but we have the knowledge and the ability to gain about 20-25% of speed increase if required in the future.

It looks like Microsoft is taking performance optimization really seriously in it's latest version of the Windows operating system ‘Windows 8’. Even though Microsoft hints at a Windows 8 release date of autumn 2012, the early speed tests are showing performance increases of up to 65%.

Some of the best performance improvements can be seen on start-up times between Windows 7 and Windows 8. The shutdown times between the two of these are comparable however it is important to bear in mind that Microsoft already made major inroads into the shutdown times in Windows 7 so I do not see this a major issue.

The question now for business owners is if they should move from Windows XP / Vista to Windows 7 now, or wait for Windows 8 to come out late in 2012 as it is looking like Windows 8 will offer some great speed improvements.

If you would like some advice on the ever moving dilemma of when to upgrade your software please contact the experts at iPing.

Can you believe it has been ten years since the launch of Microsoft Windows XP?

It is hard to believe that Microsoft Windows was released on the 25th of October 2001. The XP in Windows XP stood for 'Experience'. Banks in particular embraced Windows XP and as an operating system it was a great improvement on the previous versions of the Windows platform.

Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 and one of the big factors in this is down to the fact that most new computers are shipping with Windows 7. Big businesses have not been as quick to move from XP to Windows 7 but this is starting to happen at a faster pace now.

If you are looking for some advice on moving from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 why not contact iPing.

Q1: Do they take the time to explain what they are doing and answer your questions in plain old English?

Our Answer: Our technicians are trained to have the ‘heart of a teacher’ and will take time to answer your questions and explain everything in simple terms. Just look at what Niall ó h-Éalaithe from Open Office Architects www.openofficearchitects.ie had to say:

“i-Ping helped us to set up our printing, network, security and backup systems. We were very pleased with their prompt response and their friendly and professional service. We are happy to recommend them to other companies.”

Q2: Do they consistently offer new ways to improve your network’s performance, or do they wait until you have a problem to make recommendations?

Our Answer: We conduct quarterly review meetings with our clients to look for new ways to help improve their operations, lower costs, increase efficiencies, and resolve any problems that may be arising. Our goal with these meetings is to help our clients be more profitable, efficient, and competitive.

Q3: Do they provide detailed invoices that clearly explain what you are paying for?

Our Answer: We provide detailed invoices that show what work was done, why, and when, so you never have to guess what you are paying for. We also double-check our invoices for accuracy before they are sent to you.

Q4: Do they have Professional Indemnity (PI) insurance to protect you if something goes wrong?

Our Answer: iPing is fully insured so on the off chance that something goes wrong with a job that we are working on for you, you can be sure that we are covered for the work that we are doing on your network.

Maintenance Of Your Network:

Q5: Do they insist on remotely monitoring your network 24-7-356 to keep critical security settings, virus definitions, and security patches up-to-date and PREVENT problems from turning into downtime, viruses, lost data, and other issues?

Our Answer: Yes; our remote network monitoring system watches over your network and constantly looks for developing problems, security issues, and other problems so that we can address them before they turn into problems.

Q6: Do they provide you with a report that shows all the updates, security patches, and status of every machine on your network so you know for SURE your systems have been secured and updated?

Our Answer: On our total computer care package we provide our clients with a detailed report that shows an overall health of their network and the updates to their antivirus, security settings, patches, and other important network checks.

Q7: Is it standard procedure for them to provide you with written network documentation detailing, your critical passwords?”

Our Answer: On our total computer care package all clients receive this in written and electronic form at no additional cost. We also perform a quarterly update on this material and make sure certain key people from your organization have this information and know how to use it, giving you complete control over your network.

Backups And Disaster Recovery:

Q8: Do they INSIST on monitoring an offsite as well as an onsite backup, or are they letting you rely on tape backups?

Our Answer: We do not advise our clients to use just tape backups because they are unreliable. We make sure all of our clients have an online backup that will work at all times and not a tape backup system that relay on someone changing tapes.

Q9: Do they INSIST on doing periodical test restores of your backups to make sure the data is not corrupt and could be restored in the event of a disaster?

Our Answer: We perform regular tests on backups for our clients to make sure their data can be recovered in the event of an emergency. After all, the WORST time to “test” a backup is when you desperately need it.

Q10: Do they insist on backing up your network BEFORE performing any type of project or upgrade?

Our Answer: We do; and that’s simply as a precaution in case a hardware failure or software glitch causes a major problem.

Technical Expertise And Support:

Q11: Do their technicians maintain current vendor certifications and participate in on-going training?

Our Answer: Our technicians are required to keep the most up-to-date vendor certifications.  Our engineers have Microsoft, Dell or Cisco qualifications.

Q12: Do their technicians arrive on time and dress professionally?

Our Answer: Our technicians are true professionals that you would be proud to have in your office. They dress professionally, show up on time and if they cannot for some unforeseen reason we always notify the client immediately. We believe these are minimum requirements for delivering a professional service.