As you may have read in this space before, I am a refugee of the music business.  If you read the title of this blog, you may also have some idea of where this is going…  You see, I view the traditional “break fix” method of IT support as a perfect parallel to the “record business” of the eighties.  Back in those halcyon days, the record business could do no wrong.  They were busy slappin’ themselves on the back for forcing everyone to toss out their old recordings and replace them with new “perfect sound forever” CD’s.  With no end in sight to windfall profits, the music business relied, for the most part, on promoting people straight through the “Peter Principle” to what use to be in the seventies called “God’s way of sayin’ you make too much money”.  These unqualified “business men” spent their days largely congratulating each other on their marketing genius while attending “listening” (read: eating and drinking) parties at the expense of the artist (yep, promotional costs are taken out of the artist royalties).  Or, worse yet, selling “advertising”, uncut (new, and returnable), no royalty CD’s under the table for a 50% discount off of the wholesale price to retailers.  The discs were intended to offset advertising cost for the retailer to promote a particular artist (the cost of manufacturing charged back to the artist), but were instead sold by the retailers for a higher margin, or returned to the manufacturer for the full wholesale price (unbelievably, DEDUCTING the royalties for the artist against their “sales”).  Sadly, I personally witnessed the later on a scale of skids per week.  Then came the nineties and the oughts…  Competition from other entertainment options, hubris and new technology alternatives for the artists rendered the music business un-recognizable.   Now, clearly, this is an extreme example.  Not, in my opinion, too far off the current state of IT support, though.*  Now, it turns out, it is more efficient to provide IT support remotely than it is in house (more than 90 percent of IT problems can be found, diagnosed and fixed remotely).  Guess who the last people in the world are who are going to tell you this…  That’s right, the guys who are profiting from their own inefficiency.  As in the record business, the current break fix model relies on static as opposed to dynamic evolution.  While the IT specialists aren’t wasting your money as obviously as the record weasels of the eighties, they are, in fact, wasting your money.  Sure, like the music business, there are a couple of advantages to having in house support.  There’s a human that you can refer to with a question (kind of like a human “liner note”).  Plus you get that, erm, charming IT attitude.  Wait.  That’s not a positive.  The problem is, just like the music business, the fourth dimension is often being ignored: TIME!  Sellers/providers often assume the customer has plenty of it, and underestimate the relevance of it’s value.  It seems a long way to go, but there you have it:  Keep up or stay out of the way IT service providers.  And pass that mirror this-a-way please (Ha!  Like my heart wouldn’t explode).

* A friend of mine suggested that, indeed, it is not such an extreme example…  Something about driving a city bus where it clearly doesn’t belong on the person of the IT support customer.

What next, a plague of locusts? I have opined about tough economic times here before, but jeez it’s getting a little nutty out there.  I think it’s time to make everything a bit more efficient, wouldn’t you say?  How many people do you currently employ to keep your IT infrastructure and software running smoothly?  Chances are you have at least one person that keeps the whole shebang operational and several “experts” on retainer.  This traditional metric has served business well for some time.  There is, however, a more efficacious way of going about the business of keeping everything running smoothly. 

Computer hardware, as it turns out, is remarkably reliable stuff.  “Yeah right” I can hear you saying.  “How come I’m always having IT problems?”  Take a look at your invoices for IT support.  See much in the way of hardware?  Nope.  It’s all labor.  And – shocker - it’s less than clear what exactly was done and to what.  Most problems are between one piece of hardware and another, out of date patches/updates, or malicious attacks on unprotected systems. 

Now imagine a world where all of your hardware and software is continually monitored for errors, user errors, patches, updates, licensees and network policy–A system that PROACTIVELY looks for that glitch, patch, or miscreant that’s about to bring your company to it’s knees.  Now, imagine having all this and paying significantly less for it.  Sounds like a sweet world doesn’t it? Certainly better than the $4.00-a-gallon world we’re living in now. 

Enter Office Assurance.  An enterprise that is spending on the order of 100k a year for IT support can cut those costs by 80%.  You may want to re-read that last sentence.  That’s right, EIGHTY big ones.  Now I hear you saying “Tell us, oh Shaman of the computer”…  Look, I’m no Carlos Castaneda and there’s really nothing mystical about it.  Basically, it’s self policing.  Considering computers can only tell the difference between 1’s and 0’s, they truly are remarkable tools.  The fact is, by being a bit clever our remarkable tool can be used to monitor your remarkable tool, for a fraction of the price of doing it manually, AND do it better.  Isn’t that what made computers so desirable in the first place?  Now was that locusts, or frogs?  I can never keep ‘em straight.

Slow computer? It’s not as complex as time travel, or is it?

PCASSURANCE by DialAGeek is designed to streamline the routine maintenance that is essential in keeping your Windows or Mac-based computers operating as well as the first day you took it out of the box. Besides the obvious spyware and virus threats, all computers accumulate unnecessary and potentially dangerous bits of broken data and extraneous files. Computers – even those that are never online – when “opening” a document or file require the assembling of all sorts of disparate parts. The bigger the file (read: family photos) the wackier. After you’re through fiddling with this particular group of ones and zeros most of the connections are erased. The key word here is MOST. You see, RAM (Random Access Memory) acts as a kind of sorting machine that, due to the complexity of computing, can’t always put back everything the same way it came out. An obvious example of this would be if you make a change to a document. In order to keep track of changes, documents often run in parallel with themselves. In other words, two different files of nearly the same thing exist simultaneously. Without getting all Back to the Future on you, clearly there’s a potential for danger when two things that are one exist (you know, “time space continuum” stuff) at the same time. At any rate, all this whizzing around in time – strike that – assembling and disassembling of data leaves a few bits, here and there, un-accounted for. Quickly, these bits and pieces add up to a slower, and space deprived computer that hardly resembles the one you took out of the box a couple of months ago. This is the stuff that PCASSURANCE sorts out for you on an ongoing basis. In fact, two of the leading contributors to extra bits of data – page memory and temporary memory – are cleaned every four hours. Weekly, the entire disc is inspected for misplaced or extraneous bits of information that are shuffled around or deleted for optimum performance. You don’t want Marty and his siblings completely disappearing from your “memory”, now do you.

Ahhh! The economy is in shambles. How can you protect your bottom line with unbelievable spiraling costs? A couple of years ago I was in touch with an old High School friend (all right, it was our 30th High School reunion. Doh). He went out of his way to point out how I hadn’t exactly “mellowed” over the years. “Look around, man. Gas is nearly three bucks a gallon. The housing market’s bubble is about to burst, and just how long has this positive “economic cycle” been going anyway?” Now if I had said all of this and purposely positioned myself in a field on the cutting edge of cost saving IT management, I’d be doing some seriously contorted back slappin’ about now. Well, at least I’m on the side of the solution, as opposed to the problem (And, I was right, Brad). Now that EVERYONE is looking for a way to decrease costs and improve their bottom line, here I am at a company that does just that. It turns out that delivering IT management through remote automation provides – are you ready – more for less. Ok, you’re saying, I get the less, but what about the more? Put simply, PROACTIVE management crushes the old “break fix” model. You see, it’s a billion times (approximately) easier to keep track of licenses, patch management, errors, hard drive space and all of those other pesky, mind numbing details with – again, are you ready – computers, not that expensive IT fella. Frequently, problems are addressed before a user has any idea that there is a problem. If a problem does arise, a technician has a “dashboard” look into the users’ entire IT environment, typically solving the problem remotely (again, without the IT fella). This amounts to about 60k saving in your average sized IT environment, and considerably more if you’re talking about hundreds of workstations. More for less in perilous times; maybe I am some sort of clairvoyant. I think I’ll call Australia to find out tomorrow’s lottery numbers.

Although I think it’s painfully clear that most blogs are just another avenue for blowhards to hear (read: read) themselves talk, I’m here to tell you: Not me man, uh uh, I’ve got something to say! Sure I do. Alright, how about something useful (I think that’s what blogs were intended for)… I stumbled into a problem with a little used (now anyway) Pentium iii PC I found collecting dust at home. You see, my drive (a giant 16 gigs) was approximately HALF fragmented. Oh yeah, additionally, it only had about 1 % of free space available, rendering it un-defragable! After deleting everything I didn’t need, I tried running MS De-frag, and came up no better off. I know what you’re thinking. Why the heck would I even bother to use the MS De-frag? I figured it was a good base line to compare anything else I would end up trying (apparently the base line was a flat line). Anyway, the next step was Piriform’s free Defraggler. I must say, Defragler is an amazing product considering its price. Defraggler typically finds 30% more fragmented files and potential disc space than the MS-DF. Unfortunately, Defraggler wasn’t able to defrag much of anything either. Ok, so this blog is useful and self serving. Next step: DialAGeek’s PC Assurance. I downloaded our residential optimization package and the results were remarkable. After a few minutes of analyzing, I was given a message that said that PC Assurance needed to re-start my computer. While re-booting, I was shown a message that a “boot” defrag was in progress. After about 10 minutes, I was fully logged in and decided to re-analyze with Defraggler. There were still a number of files that were a problem, but the amount of disc space that was fragmented was down from 8 gig to less than a gig (BTW, Defraggler wasn’t able to repair any more files either; I’m guessing physical damage). Someone needs to do some ‘splainin’ here, I thought. What is it we do that is so different than the other guys? I went straight to the head Geek, who berated me and my status as a Geek. “Dude, I lamely retorted, I know what PC Assurance is and what it can do, but HOW does it do it so much better than your typical de-frager?” It turns out there’s more than one way to de-frag. The goal of defragmenting a drive is to create as much open disc space as possible. Some programs reconnect fragments of files well enough but do not compact them like a trash-compacter so that the open space is maximized. It’s something like trying to clear a page as one whole as opposed to sixteen. Clear out all of the segments and make ‘em whole. How’s that for ‘splainin’? It turns out that the air is significantly cooler when the words have actual value.