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I manage a small shop of me and my wife. We have a customer list over 1000 people but say at any one time only a few hundred are active. Includes Macs, PCs, Servers, Wifi, and Web Design. I suppose when you have a small shop you are stuck doing just about anything. In any case I HATE new apple stuff because of all the loving glue/tape they use instead of screws. Makes doing stuff a million times harder than it needs to be. I suppose the upside is you get to be an expert with a heat gun. I also branched out to doing electronics repair. Not too hard! EEVBlog on youtube is an invaluable resource. Oh and Mikrotik routers are a small shop's dream. Cheap and reliable. As far as computers go, both Windows and MacOS are loving up massively right now. Both are needlessly complex and unreliable. Mark my words, Google is gonna eat their cake over the next 10 years. redeyes fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Sep 7, 2015 |
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Sep 7, 2015 14:31
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bizwank posted:How long have you been in business? We're a two-man shop in year 4, and busy enough now that I'm comfortable turning away jobs that I know will take more time then we can bill for or the high-maintenance customers who will stretch a single repair into 3 months of phone support. Took a while to get here though, first couple of years we took any work we could get just to keep the lights on, but a highly focused marketing campaign (mostly adwords, including lots of negative ones) and a better web presence then the competition gradually resulted in more and more of the gravy jobs coming in, to the point that we now practically own that market and have to advertise very little (most of our referrals are word-of-mouth or via Yelp). It helps that there are a few other good shops in town that I can refer the unwanted work to (they in turn send me the jobs that they don't want) so even the customers that we turn away end up with a good impression of us because we're still helping them. If you don't like working on Macs there's probably someone else in town who does, but doesn't like a segment of their PC business. Couldn't hurt to open a dialog with them about it... 10 years. Yeah I do turn away anything I am sure I cannot fix relatively easily. Just not worth the hassle. I do fix tons of Apple machines, almost always hard drives blowing up. MacOS odds and ends, virus removals is huge now too. Bottom line, I work on any computer. I don't take sides, whoever pays gets fixed. The bigger money stuff is Hotel/business wireless... ooh baby.
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Sep 10, 2015 01:22
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Onedrive is a loving joke. As is typical of microsoft recently, everything they make is badly thought out and buggy as hell. Android is going to eat their loving lunch.
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Sep 27, 2015 15:11
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Eikre posted:It's there a good utility or process by which I can spoof Win10 validation on a machine (to claim free upgrades), short of actually installing Win10? Upgrade from Windows 7/8 which is activated and done.
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Jun 20, 2016 15:55
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I love how Gsuite doesn't allow easy contact sharing. After like 8 loving years.
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Mar 14, 2017 02:36
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NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:Yeah I just had someone ask me about that a few weeks ago. They have one main account and delegate the contacts through there to everyone. Sounds horrible. It's why I haven't recommended Google Apps since it came out of beta. Customers demand contact sharing. Office 365 for business has been doing the trick and if I were to pay money I would say gently caress Google's apps for small business stuff.
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Mar 14, 2017 04:49
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GargleBlaster posted:Honestly we placebo the gently caress out of them with ccleaner and defraggler etc but there are only so many times you can do that before they see through it. Wipe and reinstall can help for a few months for reasons that probably only Microsoft truly knows. I have no idea why you waste time loading that garbage.. but yeah I stock cheapo Sandisk 120 and 240GB drives. I can get about %50 of people to upgrade because omg slow computer... it's my biggest upgrade by far.
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Apr 28, 2017 14:36
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GargleBlaster posted:What the gently caress else are we supposed to do?! THEY WON'T loving SPEND MONEY, I ALREADY SAID SO. Unless I pay out of my own pocket, SSD is not happening. ccleaner is actually pretty good at decluttering poo poo like temp files at least, then as much as it pains me to use such archaic things, defraggler is about the best free disk defragmentation software. There's only so much we can do to help the "omg slow computer" people because quite understandably they're suffering from cheap 5400rpm pieces of poo poo that came with the last desktop refresh like 7 years ago. How about because its a waste of time and they don't speed up a computer. You can always say, sorry, this needs a hardware upgrade but other than that its time for a new computer. I mean after a while you aren't going to get repeat customers because that poo poo doesn't work.
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Apr 28, 2017 15:52
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Well I don't usually help people with no money but maybe your business model is different...
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Apr 28, 2017 16:05
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Thanks Ants posted:The APs are OK, their point-to-point wireless is really good. The other stuff is a bit 'meh', I don't get the hype that people get wrapped in and try and build their entire network using kit from a single vendor. Same here. The management stuff is actually not that easy to deal with in my opinion.
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May 10, 2017 00:37
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All the 'cloud' Quickbooks services I've seen use RDP into a Windows server somewhere.
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Jul 6, 2017 17:28
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Jack the Lad posted:Thanks people who recommended Dell - I went with Latitudes and got a good price. Just curious what you had in mind
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Oct 2, 2017 15:17
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sneakyfrog posted:with three people honestly friend you could use office 365 onedrive as your backup and run no server. or just a small essentials server for a fraction of your cost like sub 1k not including hardware. I wouldn't do that. CPAs tend to like real computers and servers and will spend on it. Basically the ones I know use a Windows 7 Pro workstation as a server with RAID drives. Then they rotate USB HD backups and have Carbonite as a last resort type of thing. I don't do cloud stuff with them because it would take too long to get back up and running if something poo poo the bed.
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Nov 4, 2017 16:24
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Thats what Essentials exists and the whole thing is a crock of poo poo.
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Nov 4, 2017 17:03
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sneakyfrog posted:i stand chastened. Working on Saturdays tends to do that. Go home you are IT'd.
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Nov 4, 2017 17:28
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Google Apps.. contact sharing. Christ. Hangouts still works for my apps account. I heard they were going to can it but I still use it every day and with the Dialer functionality. redeyes fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 14:38
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Whats this PST business? Don't y'all run into OSTs?
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Nov 24, 2017 23:23
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Rick posted:I'm honestly at a loss as where to ask this in 2017 and there doesn't seem to be a perfectly relevant thread. Quickbooks bro. Just start using it at the new year. Great timing! Do you really want to give your accountant something other than a QB file?
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Dec 21, 2017 01:06
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I'm not saying QB is good, I'm saying accounts want to see a QB file. Good luck! [edit] Compared to Access, QB is better. There is zero reason to code any accounting anything at this point. If your accounting structure is not straight up normal which you indicated it is not, figure out why and fix the accounting. Sooner or later you will regret it. redeyes fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Dec 21, 2017 |
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Dec 21, 2017 02:23
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Matt Zerella posted:It wasn't a shot against you, I just have PTSD from Quickbooks. I loving hate QB and yet I migrated from my own Access DB to a QB one because I don't want to ever do accounting again. That was 10 years ago or so.
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Dec 21, 2017 02:28
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The Fool posted:Did you know that if you're installing Quickbooks from a CD, that the install time will be 50%-80% shorter if you copy the contents of the CD to the local HD first, then run the installer from that folder? CD? It's all downloads from here.
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Dec 21, 2017 02:38
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The Fool posted:Sorry, that was more of a "Quickbooks is bad" anecdote than any useful advice today, since Intuit's primary distribution method has been digital downloads for at least 5 years now. I can't tell funny from true anymore. Shoot me now.
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Dec 21, 2017 04:45
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what kind of IT hell is that?!
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Jan 12, 2018 02:59
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Powered Descent posted:WAY back in the day, maybe 12 years ago, I built an IPCop box as the edge router for each of our offices. The boss liked that it had near-zero hardware cost (since any junky old PC we had lying around would work fine; just throw in another NIC), and I liked that it did site-to-site VPN and even OpenVPN for roaming users, with really minimal setup required. Yeah, I was a little leery of the whole company depending on cobbled-together frankenhardware and some obscure Linux distro, but it all worked great, for years on end. Truth is, random old PCs are 100x more reliable than modern tiny surface mount stuff. They were built to last. China does not build to last.
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Jan 18, 2018 00:55
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COOL CORN posted:Automatically having Cortana shout at you at max volume was the dumbest loving design decision. Windows 10s full of similarly brain dead design decisions.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:24
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I managed some SBS and Exchange boxes like 7-8 years ago and my god I would never do that again. Im sure its better now (probably NOT!), but Office 365 has been my savior over the last years. And gently caress outlook. How in hell did MS make it worse, not better?!
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Feb 14, 2018 16:15
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quote:DHCP (not configured when i arrived, the router was doing that) And that worked?! Thats like the first rule of SBS, DHCP on the server.
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Feb 16, 2018 16:30
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sneakyfrog posted:sooo where does windows 10 professional for workstations fit into that Far as I can tell, its 10 Enterprise with a power plan which has any power saving stuff turned off for OMG MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE. I get the feeling it is for more realtime systems.
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Feb 25, 2018 18:04
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Thanatosian posted:Recognize that the reason your predecessor did that clearly insane thing is likely because s/he was told "make it work right now, and don't spend any money on it." This describes almost all IT problems. Almost.
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May 16, 2018 00:18
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There is a fine line between insanity and money. Know your limits.
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May 16, 2018 02:50
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Something something XML file you edit somewhere in there and then you customize the start menu. Perfectly obvious.
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May 25, 2018 00:23
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To be fair I would blame HP along with Edge. HP just sucks anymore.
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May 26, 2018 14:39
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Yeah just running Tax software though? That could be anything really. I dunno why people are so averse to building a server box for a small operation. I use Asrock Rack motherboards, seasonic PSUs. Enterprise HDs, ECC RAM. Not hard whatsoever. Never had a failure or even so much as a call about something breaking.
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May 31, 2018 05:04
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pixaal posted:Liability. I'd never build a PC for any company I work for. You end up being support after you leave, and any problems are instantly your fault. God forbid the thing fails. Key word, 'small operation'. Im curious though, what kind of server couldn't run a few extra software packages? I honestly can't even think of a scenario other than not having enough storage space or an older OS.
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May 31, 2018 17:21
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pixaal posted:In this case I assumed it was set up for a single software package based on the chain of "Only runs tax software", and that the additional stuff would be rather demanding on CPU or RAM. Disk space isn't going to be the issue, but if you can run 5 times as much stuff as you purchase it for, you probably went a bit nuts on something. None of this scares me in the least. But of course I price my stuff with all this in mind. You sure you actually meant small shops? Maybe your definition and mine are different.
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Jun 1, 2018 00:04
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eames posted:Is it a common/accepted practice to run a public guest WiFi off the same firewall as the internal one(s) or should I push our contractor to keep it on a separate box? The ISP provides us multiple public IPs/ethernet ports on the router so it wouldn't be hard to just set up an extra device. Just get a seperate router. Costs what, $100 bux at most?! quote:At minimum have guest traffic going out it's own IP, and preferably through its own firewall. Yeah and what if a guest downloads the latest blockbuster movie torrent on your business IP address. Not good things anyhow. This can easily be done with VLANs as well.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:23
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eames posted:Their main argument is maintenance overhead and the fact the same WiFI will eventually provide access to the internal LANs via a seperate WPA2 encrypted SSID anyway (which I'm hesitant about due to security concerns Maintenance overhead is a BS excuse. Put that one aside for a moment. Needing access to internal LANs means you probably should do VLANs. I actually have my own network set up like this with PFsense and Ubiquiti APs. It was really easy to accomplish actually.
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Nov 2, 2018 18:58
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I like to give people a call on the phone so I don't have to stare at their face the whole time I am not paying attention.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:15
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Matt Zerella posted:Most of the time our conferences are voip only without video. Thank god am i rite.
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Mar 19, 2019 00:41
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Sounds like you might want to get a 10Gbe switch, maybe connect the high bandwidth stuff to it. I bet the Qnap can get a 10Gbe interface card as well.
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Mar 20, 2019 16:04
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