blog

New FIRST4TECH 'Virus removal service'

Dan Littley — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:58:00 +0000

Almost 1 year ago I posted an article about a fairly new strain of virus we had started to see infecting some of our business customer's home/personal PC's. Since then, various other strains of this rogue antivirus or Scareware as they are also known have become far more prevelant than I expected. So much so that we have decided to launch a Virus Removal Service for home users.

What we are offering is a professional approach to virus removal. We're very aware of the horror stories you hear about people's PC's coming back wiped clean of personal data following a 'health check' or virus clean from large retail chains. We'll treat your personal data with the utmost of importance, making sure everything is backed up prior to (and restored after) any virus cleaning attempt.

For more information and pricing, click here.

Microsoft Small Business Server 2011

Jamie Vanstone — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:10:03 +0000

As promised, here is a follow up to my previous post about Microsoft Small Business 2008 now that I have had chance to take a look at the newly released SBS 2011.

The first thing with Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 is the addition of a new ‘flavour’ of the product known as Essentials. Whilst unfortunately not available to test at the time of writing this, it appears to be a quite different version of the SBS package to what we’re used to seeing. It allows a maximum of 25 users (with no CAL’s required for user access) and seems very much based around cloud services such as Hosted Exchange for email and Sharepoint for file storage. I do have reservations about cloud computing when so many parts of the UK (particularly in the South West) struggle to get a reliable broadband connection to support its use. I hope to do a better review of SBS 2011 Essentials later in the year when it becomes available.

Microsoft Small Business Server 2008

Jamie Vanstone — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:03:20 +0000

Over the last couple of years we have installed a number of new file servers for customers with the most popular build being based around Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS) 2008 operating system. But why do we choose to use SBS so often and what makes it such a good choice for the SME market?

SBS 2008 is based on Microsoft’s Windows 2008 server architecture and comes in both Standard and Premium flavours (with Premium offering extra software packages as part of the bundle). The Standard edition ships with Microsoft Exchange 2007 which has already proven to be very reliable and much easier to scale for today’s typically larger mailboxes that users tend to have. We have also found it very easy to integrate with modern smartphones which has increasinly become the norm for most of our user’s requirements.

FIRST4TECH Mazda 3 Sport (updated real car pics!)

Dan Littley — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:26:20 +0000

They're here! We've finally taken delivery of our new cars and had the livery finished today. As you can see we went for design #1 in the end - thanks for all of your excellent feedback, it really helped us get the cars looking superb.

Let us know if you see them out and about and feel free to shout at us if they're dirty! ;)

Artwork/Layout: Mark Tomline
Livery: Signs Express Exeter

FIRST4TECH Mazda 3 Sport

Dan Littley — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:06:41 +0000

FIRST4TECH will be taking delivery of a new fleet of cars in November to replace our existing Mazda 6's. We have gone for the Mazda 3 2.2D Sport (185 PS) in Crystal White Pearlescent. As with our existing fleet, we are looking to have decals applied to the cars to show off our company logo and contact information so they really stand out whilst we're driving around the South West.

We enlisted the help of Graphic Designer Mark Tomline - customer and good friend of FIRST4TECH - to help us with some ideas. Mark has come up with 6 superb designs and we'd like your input to help us decide which one looks best! Please leave a comment on this blog article or on our Facebook page.

Download a PDF of all 6 of the designs and let us know your favorite: F4T Mazda 3 Designs PDF - (517 KB)

Many thanks for your help Mark, very much appreciated. :)

'Security Tool' rogue antivirus

Dan Littley — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:07:53 +0000

There is a particularly nasty rogue antivirus application called 'Security Tool' doing the rounds just lately. It's been prevelant over the past month or two and once installed on your system it can be quite a pain to remove.

"Security Tool is a rogue antivirus application that deliberately gives reports of false system security threats on your computer and displays fake security alerts or notifications to make you think your PC is infected with malware. The misleading application is from the same family as Total security 2009 and System Security. When installed, Security Tool will be configured to start automatically when you log on into Windows. Then it will imitate system scan and display a variety of infections that can't be removed unless you purchase the program. The files detected during the scan are either harmless or legitimate system files and can't cause any damage to your computer." Source: http://www.2-spyware.com

Drop it like it's hot...?

Dan Littley — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:11:33 +0000

Ah, the seemingly never ending quest to find the ultimate online backup solution! Becoming increasingly aware of the need to back up my important documents and photo's at home I've been on the lookout for an online backup service in recent months. Whilst having found Amazon's S3 technology impressive, without a standardised client app from Amazon themselves, I found most of the S3 compatible software on the internet to be in beta and/or just plain rubbish. Then a friend of mine (thanks Nick!) pointed me in the direction of Dropbox.

Does IT drive you up the wall? Me too!

Jamie Vanstone — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:04:54 +0000

I have always been a fan of outdoor activities and over the years have tried my hand at canoeing, canyoning, mountain biking, rafting, surfing, flying (and jumping out of) planes amongst other things, all of which I have always really enjoyed, but my regular activity of late has been climbing. Since September last year me and my family all became members of a fantastic indoor climbing centre called Dart Rock in Buckfastleigh.

The centre is run by Paula and Robbie Warke along with a wonderful group of friendly, fun and helpful staff. Dart Rock is a fantastic venue with an amazing atmosphere and I must admit that both myself and my son are now totally addicted to climbing!

There's an app for that!

Dan Littley — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:29:58 +0000

September 3^rd 2009. That was the day I finally managed to convince Jamie to switch to an Apple iPhone! We had been using Windows Mobile based phones (HTC Touch) for the past 18 months and were pretty pleased with them. However in the past 6 months or so, many of our friends, family and more importantly customers have been upgrading to iPhones. With each small snippet of use to setup their Microsoft Exchange email, I grew more and more impressed with the iPhone and quickly became convinced it was better than any other mobile phone on the market. All I had to do was to convince Jamie!

Cloud computing suites - is this the future?

Dan Littley — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:32:12 +0000

It’s been a long time since I've used Outlook and POP3 email delivery for personal use - I've been using Google Mail for a while now and can’t recommend it highly enough. Intrigued by the number of different area’s Google seemed to be getting involved in recently I wondered if they did domain hosting. A friend of mine mentioned Google Apps and I didn't really know what it was, so I decided to take a look.

In a nutshell, Google Apps allows businesses to deploy Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other web apps to its employees. Everything's hosted by Google, which is what really caught my attention once I started to think about it. Instead of purchasing the hardware and software for say a Microsoft Small Business Server (to act as a File & Print server and Exchange server) and individual Microsoft Office licenses, for $50 per user per year you can deploy Google Apps to each of your staff - effectively outsourcing your IT hardware and software. Now whilst I’m not entirely sure a lot of SME's are ready to embrace this kind of forward thinking technology quite yet, I can certainly see the immediate benefits - 99.9% uptime guarantee, effectively unlimited storage, no special hardware or software requirements and all for around 1/3 of the total cost of competing solutions.