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Showing posts from 2009

Helpful Computing Guides now Available on Quad's Website

Quad have recently published a number of helpful guides in order to keep your PC and business running smoothly and efficiently. The guides can be found here on Quad's website and are aimed at the novice user, not the PC techie. The first release includes :- Backup and Disaster Recovery - useful notes on backup best practices. Take action now to minimise disruption, should disaster strike! PC Health Tips - Defragmenting Your Hard Drive - gain some performance by ensuring your hard disk drive is working as efficiently as possible. PC Health Tips - Disk Cleanup - get more space on your hard disk drive. Quad has been helping businesses in Sheffield and South Yorkshire keep their IT infrastructre running smoothly since 1987. We provide IT support services in Sheffield and South Yorkshire

Backup Best Practices

If the data on your server was lost, what would you do? At some point, everyone will lose data. It is often at this point you will realise how good your backup strategy is. There are several data loss scenarios to consider... Hardware Failure Hardware is becoming more and more resilient, but it will never be 100% perfect. Although better quality components cost more and reduce the risk of failure, failure can never be completely eliminated. Backing up your data will allow you to be prepared when it does happen. A common misconception is that backups are not required when a server has mirrored disks or RAID. This is not the case! User Error Users can often delete or overwrite important files accidentally. Sometimes they realise this immediately, other times the error is not detected until much later when the file is next needed. Having a backup which enables you to retrieve files from a long time ago will help in this situation. Fire/Theft/Flooding The end result of these can be

Quad Online Backup - First Sale!

Quad is proud to announce the first sale of its online backup solution, QuadBackup . Before its official launch, our good customer, Arches Housing Ltd, had been helping us to trial the software. They had been looking for a reliable way of storing their backup off site , instead of the weekly tape drop-off at Quad by courier. When QuadBackup was in its final phases of testing, we set it up at Arches to give them an idea of how it would work. We had been monitoring the testing, and all had been going very well. Whilst finalising how to launch the product, we received a call asking to restore a folder which had been accidentally deleted some time ago. As it happened, the oldest tape (two weeks) was offsite at Quad, so we restored the folder from it which had around 150Mb of data in it. Using QuadBackup, however, we restored over 750Mb of data as the history went back for several months. Needless to say, Arches were delighted at this and have snapped-up the QuadBackup.

Clearing the Visual Studio Web Cache

Working with Visual Studio 2008 on websites with other developers, I was continually annoyed by the message :- Confirm Save To Web Server A more recent version of the file [filename] has been saved to the Web server by [username] on [DateTime] Do you want to replace the server file with your local file? Yes/No I didn't want to replace the server file with my local file. In fact, I wanted to update my local file with the one from the server if someone else had changed it! This situation got steadily more annoying as more files were changed on the site, meaning that it took many clicks of "no" (would be nice to have had "no to all") just to exit Visual Studio (2008). This message appeared whether or not I had changed a file. Extensive searching on the internet, within help files and looking at options did not reveal anything which helped me. Finally, I pieced together the following which worked for me, and hopefully will work for you. It appears

Dore House Industrial Estate - New Blog

Quad has started a blog specifically for Dore House Industrial Estate. View it here.

Quad Raises Neighbouring Companies’ Web Presences

Quad Computer Services Ltd has always believed that helping its neighbours is important. This summer, we set up a web site for the Dore House Industrial Estate in Handsworth, Sheffield, where we are based. The site, www.dore-house-industrial-estate.co.uk , is free for anyone on the industrial estate and allows companies to put up details about their services as well as highlight their location on a map. We have had a positive response from people on the estate. The site has a good Google Ranking already, which helps the companies on there. We also have a feature which allows each company to show their location exactly as we have found that SatNavs based on the postcode often take you to the wrong place!

Quad Attain DrayTek Advanced Networking Partner Accreditation

Quad Computer Services Ltd confirmed their status as leading providers of secure, remote networking solutions in Sheffield and South Yorkshire by attaining the status of Advanced Networking Partner from DrayTek. Linking sites together is an important part of modern business. Resources can be shared easily and reliably between multiple sites, in particular for home workers or management needing access to information at all times. Some of the advanced features of the DrayTek range allow companies to use Voice over IP services across the network with often significant savings in phone charges. There are features to allow use of two ADSL lines, failing over should one line go down.
Welcome to the Quad Computer Services Ltd first blogging post. Here we intend to post news articles and items that may be of interest and hopefully useful to you. We have been providing bespoke computer services to Sheffield and South Yorkshire since 1987. We write write and support software, sell and support hardware and we are an ISP which means we host websites, email and can provide broadband services.