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Office burnout is similar to the physical term, ?exhaustion.? You do too much, and it has a mental effect on how you work and behave. Just like any other illness, it?s important to take measures to prevent it. Otherwise, you risk a full-on epidemic, and before you know it, you won?t be the only one suffering. There are several ways you can cut down on working yourself to the bone: Mini-breaks. Careful use of sick and vacation time. Physical activity. Getting enough sleep. Getting along with co-workers. Shorter commutes. Short Breaks are the Best BreaksInc. recommends business professionals take breaks every twenty minutes. It might sound like a lot of breaks, but honestly, you do it to yourself subconsciously anyway, even if it doesn?t feel like it. Instead of staring at Facebook for a minute or two, get up and move around. Physical movement is good for you, and taking a break from your computer monitor will feel like a micro-vacation. Don?t Waste Sick Days on Not-Sick DaysA lot of employees will call in sick due to stress or other personal issues. Don?t be one of them. If you come in and you?re not mentally rested, your work quality will suffer. Save your sick days for when you?re actually feeling sick. The same can be said about your vacation time. Do you really think you?ll be able to take it all at once in some glamorous trip? That sure would be nice; but, in all likelihood, it probably won?t happen. Try and plan out when you think you?ll need a break, and take vacation days accordingly. Light Physical Fitness Never Hurt Anyone? MuchA great way to spend your mini-breaks is to get your blood pumping with some light exercise. There are a variety of exercises perfect for the office, such as leg lifts and stretches. These can help keep your body physically fit (because sitting down all day certainly doesn?t help). You can even get some light weights to carry around, which will help keep your muscles active even while at work. It?s been scientifically proven that when you feel better about yourself, you perform better in the workplace, so take advantage of any little bit you can. Get a Good Night?s SleepObviously, rest is an essential part of staying healthy, both physically and mentally. You should aim to hit the hay at a decent time that will let you wake up naturally without an alarm clock, but sometimes that?s easier said than done, especially when you?re trying out a new sleep schedule. Start by going to bed earlier and earlier every night, then keep progressing until you are waking up naturally at the desired time. You should still set an alarm clock, as even the body can make mistakes. Keep in mind that the goal here is not to oversleep, but to ensure that you get enough rest, as sleepless nights can lead to illness and injury. Play Nice with OthersIt should go without saying that you should treat others how you would like to be treated, but sometimes gossip and a tense environment can lead to unintended circumstances. A negative workplace saps the energy out of your very being, so it?s in everyone?s best interests to create the best working environment possible. If you like who you work […]

Don’t be Afraid to Replace Got an older PC that’s causing you a lot of issues? Older technology is typically more expensive to run, and after a while, it’s cheaper to simply buy a new desktop than it is to continue pouring money into something that always seems broken. It’s a great time to buy workstations, and if things are tight you can even buy refurbished desktops to keep costs low. Enforce Energy Efficiency If you reduce the amount of energy your technology uses each day, your utility bill from the electric company will decrease as well. Switching to LCD monitors (if you are still using old CRT dinosaurs), and enforcing company-wide policies to turn off monitors or put workstations to sleep at night can make a big difference. Stop Dealing with Vendors You hired your employees to work, not sit on the phone with a PC manufacturer because your hard drive crashed. Businesses waste money by paying employees to go around in circles with vendor tech support all the time. IT firms like White Mountain IT Services build relationships with vendors and are able to get things done faster. This means issues get resolved quickly and your employees don’t need to deal with less-than-helpful support. Stop Paying your Phone Bill Yes, you heard us right. Cease paying your phone company by switching over to a VoIP solution instead. Small businesses save up to 80% on their telephone communication expenses, so the investment pays for itself quickly. Many VoIP systems allow your users to take their phone and use it anywhere, giving you increased flexibility and functionality. Get Proactive Monitoring and Maintenance Nearly all day-to-day IT issues can be completely prevented with just a little bit of maintenance. White Mountain IT Services offers these services to our clients, reducing the amount of downtime they experience. Traditional computer support only fix computer issues when they arise. White Mountain IT Services provides proactive monitoring and maintenance to ensure fewer issues plague your business.

Let’s look at the definition of disaster. dis?as?ter A calamitous event, especially one occurring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage, or hardship, as a flood, airplane crash, or business failure. To White Mountain IT Services, a disaster is anything that involves a major loss of data or major downtime. When one of our clients experience a server malfunction that leaves most employees sitting idle unable to work, that is a disaster. The Cost of a Disaster Downtime is a very terrible expense to not try to avoid. Try this simple formula for yourself: Number of Employees Affected by an IT Outage X Average Employee Hourly Cost (NOT WAGES)+ Average Company Hourly Income X Percentage of Income Lost Due to the IT Outage This simple formula will tell you about how expensive every hour of downtime is for your company. The hardest value in the formula is understanding the percentage of income lost. Not all companies might have a figure, but you will want to consider it as you do the math. This doesn’t include the cost of repair, consultation, parts, or any of the remediation required to get things back up and running. Disaster’s Harbinger Disaster can strike from any direction. Hard drives can go, data can be corrupted, hardware can fail, and networks can go down, and systems can become infected with viruses and malware. User error can cause disaster, as well as theft and other malevolent activity. While companies should take precautions to safeguard themselves against threats both external and internal, and managed maintenance can prevent a lot of foreboding issues, having a solid disaster recovery plan can mean faster turnaround when there is devastating downtime. Employing a disaster recovery plan starts with the data – your most important IT asset. Computers can be replaced, hardware can be repurchased and software can be reinstalled. Your data is the culmination of countless hours of work by all of your employees ever. It’s no wonder why most businesses that suffer a major data loss go out of business within the first year. You can lose your credibility, and things go into disarray. Data needs to be backed up. Your backed up data should be archived regularly offsite. Most importantly, your backup solution needs to be easy to test, and tested regularly. You don’t want to find out your backups are corrupted when it is too late. The time to put together your company’s disaster recovery solution is now. Contact White Mountain IT Services at (603) 889-0800 to talk about solutions for safeguarding your data and your business in the event of a disaster, large or small.

First of all, what shocked us the most is that according to the FTC, in the United States, 9 million individuals have their identities stolen each year. Identity theft is a little different than identity fraud, however. Theft is when personal information is exposed and taken without permission. This is happening all the time by malicious software like spyware, but it can also happen when legitimate websites and services get infiltrated by cybercriminals. If a reputable online store (or even a database for a brick and mortar store) gets hacked into, your personal information can be stolen. That’s identity theft. Identity fraud is when that data is misused for financial gain. This is when things start to get very dangerous. In 2009, $56 billion dollars were accumulated by cyber criminals through identity fraud. The good news is in 2010 that number went down to “only” $37 billion. What does that mean to the average person? On average, victims of identity fraud had $4,841 dollars stolen per victim. Trouble is, the world has had to improve drastically to protect consumers from identity fraud. This means higher costs of doing business which then get reflected on prices of products and services. In other words, because of identity fraud, we all lose. How does your data get stolen?  There are plenty of ways, but here are a few popular methods: Hackers can pick up credentials via public Wi-Fi and public PCs. Credit Card Skimming – a process that involves your credit card data being stolen when your credit card is swiped at a standard ATM or credit card terminal. Selling or discarding used computer equipment that isn’t properly wiped can expose personal information. Hackers can infiltrate networks and databases. Dumpster diving and paper mail theft. Malware and viruses Phishing. In almost half of reported identity theft cases, the victim knew the criminal. What do you do if your identity is stolen? Almost half of all reports of identity frauds are discovered by the user first, although banks and credit card companies have methods in place to stay on top of it as well. If your financial credentials are stolen, you need to contact your bank and/or credit card companies immediately, both by phone and in writing. You’ll want to file a police report with details about where your identity was stolen, what you believe was or could have been stolen, and documented proof of the crime. You don’t want to risk identity fraud. Monitor your credit reports closely, shred sensitive mail and documents before throwing them away, and ensure your computers and network are running latest security updates and antivirus, as well as other security measures. For a complete review of your security, contact us at (603) 889-0800 and we will help pinpoint vulnerabilities and fill in the cracks before a costly event occurs.

There are several factors that contribute to the speed of a PC. Let’s very briefly break these down: CPU/Processor The CPU handles all of calculations a computer performs. These days consumer-class CPUs handle billions and even trillions of instructions per second. While dated processors can greatly influence the actual speed of a computer, if your PC is fairly new (as in 1 or 2 years old, and possibly older for higher end builds) it’s likely not bottlenecking your performance. Today, CPUs are equipped with two, four, or even more cores, which means the CPU can handle an more calculations exponentially and consume less electricity. RAM/Memory Random Access Memory is basically the short-term memory of your computer. While your computer is loading and running applications, they get stored in the RAM. The RAM is much faster than the hard drive, so your computer doesn’t need to spin it’s wheels looking for specific files and parts of applications. The more RAM you have, the more “stuff” that can be stored in it. The faster your RAM, the faster your computer can sift through the data that gets temporarily pushed into it. Once your RAM is full, your computer will depend on the hard drive to retrieve information, and that’s where things get sluggish. Once you stop running a program, it will remove itself from the RAM to free up some space for everything else running. Hard Drive The hard drive is the storage device of a computer. For extremely high-end PCs, the hard drive is the bottleneck. Hard drives, when compared to RAM, are very slow to access and write information. Once your computer needs to rely on your hard drive heavily for RAM, things are going to start getting bogged down. While it’s great that your PC can rely on your hard drive in this way for those times it needs some extra memory, it is likely this is the slowdown. Unfortunately, because hard drives are mechanical and have moving parts, there’s limitations to how fast science can make them perform. There are costly solid-state drives, but as a performance-improving factor on a standard workstation, typically solid state drives aren’t the cost-effective answer. Of course, there are software factors as well. Malware and Spyware can bog down your system, and after a lot of use, temporary files can bog things down. Before upgrading hardware, you’ll want to have a technician run a quick evaluation on your PC – it’s possible a little cleanup can make all the difference in the world. Otherwise, the next step is upgrading the RAM. RAM is usually relatively cheap, even to double or triple your existing RAM with faster, higher performance memory. Often the cost of the new RAM itself will be between $50 and $100, and more than likely less than that, and that’s for a substantial increase, but it depends on your PC. Is your computer running slow? Does it get bogged down by the time you have all of your day-to-day applications open? Contact us at (603) 889-0800 for a quick evaluation to see if a simple, cost-effective upgrade will help you perform your job more effectively.