Merry Christmas

All the team at AKM would like to take this opportunity to wish you and your staff a very Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.

We would also like to thank you for all your support during 2006; it has been Chris and mine’s first full year running AKM, and so far we do not regret our decision! We look forward to continuing to provide your business with all the support and assistance you need throughout 2007 and beyond.

Thank you and Merry Xmas to you all.

The Techie Bit - How much stuff?

How much “stuff” is on your PC?

Most of us use our PCs everyday without thinking too much about where and when we save stuff, downloads things and store our e-mail.

For those of you lucky enough to have a dedicated server we normally tell you if you’ve got too much e-mail or too much old data as part of our regular server health checks.

The rest of you are probably blissfully unaware that your hard disk is filling up with downloads, temporary files, e-mails and the like.

For this reason I hope to give you the tools and impetus to perform some spring cleaning on your PC. This can have dramatic results on older PCs, unleashing levels of performance not had since it was unwrapped and installed on your desk.

Imagine the hard disk on your computer is like an office full of filing cabinets and paper trays and desk tidies. When you first move into your office the cabinets are empty and organised, as data comes in it gets filed away into the right file in the right draw. Over time you increase the amount of work you do, stuff starts building up on your desk, the intray starts filling up in a less organised fashion. Before too long there are piles of paper everywhere, draws in cabinets are overflowing and filing gets out of order.

Imagine now that you have to find every document relating to a project. First stop is the correct file, but that’s only got stuff up to 6 months ago, next stop is the intray, that gets you from today back two weeks until that day when you scooped the contents of it out and hid them in your top draw.

An hour later you’ve got 95% of the information you need. This is exactly what happens on computer hard disks. Most of the time you spend waiting for things to load is the computer rushing around searching the whole disk.

Imagine if your computer knew where everything was first? How much faster would it be?!

The first step in computer housekeeping is “out with the old”.

Check through your e-mail and get rid of anything you don’t need anymore. If an e-mail has an attachment save it somewhere and delete the e-mail! Keep important e-mails in a new folder in your mailbox for future reference.

Once you have done this you can compact your mailbox which empties the free space created in it and reorganises the e-mails. This can make outlook load up as much as twice as fast.

Compacting can be done by going into the advanced mailbox properties in outlook. If you’ve just deleted 2 years worth of e-mail be prepared for this to take a few minutes!

Please remember when doing this to check your sent items as well as your inbox. It’s amazing how much space this can take up!

Check the contents of the “My Documents” folder on your PC. It’s amazing how lazy you can be, keeping old documents or duplicate copies.

Have you got dozens of files saved on your desktop? Are these important? I bet they aren’t being backed up, and I guarantee that they are slowing your computer down as well! Move them to “My Documents” and create shortcuts to them on your desktop.

Temporary Internet files are the next bane of computers. Every component of every webpage you’ve ever been to is probably still stored on your PC. These files are normally tiny, and there is usually hundreds of thousands of them on your PC. Delete them! You’ve all got broadband by now and you won’t notice the difference it makes to have the copy on your PC. If you’ve never done this, be prepared for a long wait! The Tools menu and Internet Options is the place to go looking for this.

Finally run the disk cleanup tool in the properties of the c:\ drive.

If you’ve cleared out and tidied the above and you still want your PC to run a bit faster there are some more things to check:

In the properties of the C:\ drive in “my computer”, disable the indexing service.

Turn off the Google desktop search or uninstall it, you should be keeping your files organised so you don’t need it!

Check the contents of the startup folder on the start menu. Lots of items in here means a slow computer but be careful, you may want or need some of the items in here.

I would also advocate turning off system restore. I know this has saved a few computers in the past but it quite often harbour viruses that have been quarantined and it can free up as much as 5-10gbs of disk space.

Once you have done all of this, you can defrag the hard disk. This is like hiring a PA to come and do all of the boring filing that is months overdue.

Customer Referrals

It is widely recognised that the way a business grows and develops is dependant upon how that business delivers its service to its customers.

We have been working very hard at AKM to improve our level of service to you by introducing new initiatives and internal processes. It is our mission to ensure that we do all that we can to guarantee that your experiences with AKM and its team is of the highest quality and standards.

There are many of you that already recognise the services we provide and how much of a positive impact we have on your business and its operations. So why not share our services with your colleagues and business associates?

Every time you recommend a business to AKM for any of the services that we can provide, we will offer you a gift of our technician’s time as a thank you.

It’s as simple as that, what have you got to loose?

Please see our Customer Referral Scheme for full details.

if you would like to provide us with feedback about any of our products or services please email feedback@akm-it.co.uk or complete our anonymous feedback form

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