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Windows 7 Slow Windows Updates

We are past the end of the free update period for Windows 10.  While the free Windows 10 upgrade converted a great many systems, there are still a large number of machines on Windows 7 which technicians will need to support until January 2020, the date when Microsoft stops releasing security updates for Windows 7.  In addition, Windows Vista […]

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USB to RS232 Serial Port adapters, clones, & counterfeits

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I’ve written before about use of modems under Windows 7 & 8. Modems are definitely old-school but still have niche area uses.  Now I’m going to be writing about another PC device that has a niche area use – the RS232 serial port – and using this to talk about and illustrate something that isn’t often covered in […]

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Using Voicemodems for network monitoring

My interest in Voicemodems started in February of 2015, ironically because of a wireless cellular company; Verizon! Up until the end of January, Verizon operated a Telelocator Alphanumeric Protocol (TAP) gateway for use by it’s customers. TAP is a very old protocol dating from the early 90’s, and it’s primary purpose is to allow computers […]

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Should I use an SSD Drive?

Solid State Drives represent a huge shift in storage. Today, most magnetic media drives are made by Western Digital or Seagate, who both have a very long history in manufacturing disk drives. SSD drives, by contrast, have largely come out of DRAM manufacturers. Names like Kingston and Samsung are prevalent. While these DRAM companies are […]

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See our new articles on dialup modem use on Windows 7

It is in the Technical Support area and titled Dialup Modems under Windows 7.

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The Institutionalization of Desktop Software

Most people who use Windows are familiar with Windows XP, in fact many people who have used it are still using it. For those who don’t recall the details, Windows XP was released in October 2001 and was supported by Microsoft until May 1 2014, when the last security patch for IE8 was released. Windows […]

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What is the TrueCrypt issue all about?

From the Wikipedia article: Here TrueCrypt is a source-available, freeware utility used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition (under Microsoft Windows, except Windows 8 with GPT) or the entire storage device (pre-boot authentication). TrueCrypt is also used as the name of the encrypted […]

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See our new Anti-Spam article

It is in the Technical Support area and titled Reducing Spam in your Inbox.

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Response to Ron Wyden Net Neutrality chat

Our response to US Senator Ron Wyden’s top 5 quotes as decided by Oregon Live, from an interview about Net Neutrality that was on Reddit on May 13th 2014. See the original article Here Ron: “…Without rules to guarantee all web traffic travels on the same track the economic might of big corporations will shove […]

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POP3 vs IMAP vs Exchange Connector

One of the early questions that we ask as email providers is what protocol are you going to be using to connect to us. This post is an attempt to explain the differences between the 3 major protocols and why we ask this question.

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