Frequently Asked Questions

Here's a selection of the technical questions we get asked most frequently. If there's something you'd like to ask us that isn't on this list, perhaps you'd like to take advantage of our free consultancy offer. Please call for details.

Q: My Broadband connection has stopped working.

A: The most common cause for this is that the ADSL service line has gone "stale". 9 out of 10 cases can usually be remedied by turning off your router for approx. 1 hour and then switching it back on. If this doesn't resolve the issue, check all connections including the filters plugged into your telephone sockets, double checking that you have a filter in every socket even if there is no telephone device attached.

     If your connection still won't work, please give us a call on 01736 799550 as we specialise in Internet related issues. 

Q: How often should I do a backup?
A: Probably daily. To decide this, you have to think about (a) how much work are you willing to lose (b) how long would it take you or your staff to do it all again and (c) at what point does it become not possible to do it all again.

Most users can cope with redoing a day's work; it's fresh in their memory and although they'll complain bitterly, it probably won't take as long to do as it did the first time. Of course, if you only use your PC once a week then a weekly backup will suffice.

If, on the other hand, your computer system is so business critical that you can't afford to lose any work or time at all, you should probably be looking at taking additional measures to secure your business' data, for example RAID drives or mirrored drives or servers.

However it's important to realise that backups and 'service continuity' measures such as these do serve two different purposes. Although both are useful in minimising the effects of hardware failure, backups are more often used to bring back files from several days or even weeks ago, because the problem was not noticed until now, while RAID, mirroring and similar techniques are used to safeguard the system as it is at this moment in time. All the RAID drives in the world will not help you get back that Excel spreadsheet that someone deleted by mistake last Wednesday.

We usually recommend our customers purchase an initial set of 10 backup tapes for their server and use the following backup strategy. Assuming you work Monday to Friday, label 4 of the tapes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, then label another 5 Week1, Week2, Week3, Week4 and Week5 (some months have 5 Fridays in them). Back up to the day tapes on the appropriate days, then on Friday use one of the week tapes, depending on which week of the month it is. When you get to the end of the month, after you've done the backup for that day, take that tape out of circulation and label it 'End December 2004' or whatever month it is, and replace it with a new tape. You will need to purchase a pack of new tapes during the second month.

There are, of course, variations on this theme; you may think it's unnecessary to have 5 'Week' tapes and just have a single Friday one; or you might want to change the date of your monthly backup to coincide with your company's month-end procedures.

The other important thing is to keep your backup tapes off-site. Then if the office burns down or thieves steal all your equipment you can at least get things back. The insurance company will pay for replacing your hardware and software but it can't recreate your data for you.

We always recommend customers set their backup software to do a full backup each time, overwriting the contents of the tape. We do not recommend incremental backups.

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Q: My computer's crashed with an 'illegal function call'. Why?
A: It's important to realise that Windows is not perfect, and neither are the programs you run on it. An 'illegal function call' means that the software you were using has just gone wrong slightly. Very often we're talking about a tiny programming error, but it will often stop your entire machine working.

If this happens rarely, you just have to be philosophical about it; it's one of those things. However if it starts happening regularly, it may be a symptom of corruption or an incompatibility between two or more pieces of software on the machine. In such cases it's best to have the machine completely rebuilt with the latest service packs, device drivers etc.

Q: What regular housekeeping do you recommend for Windows ?
A: On a regular basis (fortnightly if you use the machine daily) we recommend the following.

• Run Scandisk to check that the file system is sound (Start, Programs, Accessories, System utilities).
• Run Defrag too . As you use your PC more and more, each file you and the operating system write to the hard disk can get split into separate chunks in different areas of the disk. This makes both reading and writing them take more and more time as the system has to keep track of them all. Defragmenting gathers the chunks back together again.
  (It's a bit like children spreading their toys all over the house. Parents tidy them up again and put them all in the right boxes so that they can be found easily and quickly the next day. Then it starts all over again, of course ...)
• Check Device Manager (My computer, Properties or Control Panel, System) and look for any question marks or exclamation marks. As part of its 'Plug 'n' play' functionality, Windows  has a tendency to auto detect hardware when you don't want it to and this can lead to things not working.

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