Great Lakes Blog

May 9, 2012 By Bob Martin

Free Webinar: Server Virtualization Savings Through Power and Cooling

MAY 22nd, 3:00 PM EST: This free, 60 minute webinar shows you how to maximize the ROI you can realize through power and cooling cost reductions when you virtualize your server.

Server virtualization in the data center is a proven way to reduce the number of physical servers and reduce energy consumption.

But is it reasonable or possible to implement your next virtualization phase? Have you realized your full energy savings entitlement from the first phase?

This webinar discusses the impact virtualization has on a data center’s power and cooling infrastructure, including choosing a density strategy; implementing a high density environment; maximizing the efficiency benefit; and anticipating the dynamic data center.

Featured Speaker
Steven-Carlini
Senior Director, Data Center Global Solutions – Schneider Electric

a Ziff Davis Digital Event

This is not an event sponsored by Great Lakes Computer Corp., but one in which we believe you will find value in attending.

May 4, 2012 By Janalee Silvey

8 Tips for Preventing Laser Printer Paper Jams

Computer Laser Printer Repair Your business can be completely disrupted if your laser printer is down, particularly if you find you’re in need of printer repair. These 8 tips can help you avoid a major cause of printer repair calls – paper jams. Paper jams occur in laser printers for a number of reasons, depending partly on the printer and the type of paper you are using. By taking some simple steps, you can significantly reduce the number of laser printer paper jams you experience on a regular basis. Depending on the printer, you might even go years at a time without having to fight another paper jam while processing print jobs.

1. Use the paper guides. Each printer comes with a set of guides where you place the fresh paper in the input tray. Laser printers that have a document feeder for scanning papers also have paper guides. The paper guides should always be slid against the margins of the paper, so they can guide the paper into the machine straight. Do not push the guides against the paper’s margins so the paper bows or creases, though, since that can also lead to jams.
2. Use the correct paper. Not all paper is designed to work in any kind of printer. Some papers are made only for laser printers, others are made only for ink jet printers and still other papers are made only for copiers and are not to be used in any kind of printer. Not only can using the wrong type of paper cause jams, but they can also cause your printouts to streak or even lead to the paper melting inside the printer.
3. Clean the printer’s rollers. The rollers both at the openings in the printer, and also inside the printer’s casing, can accumulate paper dust and ink. This debris buildup eventually reaches the point that the rollers can no longer grab the paper as they should, and so the paper slips off the rollers. You can clean the rollers by rubbing a cotton swab dampened with rubbing alcohol or distilled water against the rollers while you spin them with your fingers. Always unplug the printer’s power cord before cleaning the rollers, avoiding the printer turning on by accident while you are working. How often you clean the rollers depends on how much you use the printer and how many pages you print, but figure an average printer needs its rollers cleaned about every three to four months.
4. Do not use damaged paper in your printer. Paper damage can include paper with creases, tears, dog-eared corners or papers that have sticky or rough spots on them. Also, on some new reams of paper the pieces of paper stick to each other, which can cause more than one sheet to feed into the printer at a time. You should always flip through a stack of new paper before insert it into your printer’s input tray, separating the sheets and allowing you to look for problem sheets. If you find any paper that is damaged, remove it from the stack before you place it in the printer’s input tray, causing a jam.
5. Use your printer’s paper settings. On laser printers with their own screen, you can usually change the paper type setting using the printer’s control panel. Otherwise, you must access the printer’s driver settings from the connected computer. Changing the settings actually changes the adjustments of various parts inside the printer, which are designed to guide the paper from the input to the output tray. Not changing the paper setting when you switch from regular paper to cardstock or printer label sheets can lead to repeated paper jams.
6. Never over-fill a printer’s input tray, and do not let the output tray become full beyond capacity, either. Most printer input trays have a line marked on the inside of the tray, which designates the highest point paper should occupy inside the tray. Loading the paper in the tray higher than the line often results in paper jams. Similarly, printers can only hold so many printed sheets of paper in the output tray before creating a backlog that causes a jam.
7. Do not mix paper types in the printer’s input tray. If you need to print on more than one type of paper, you need to run one print job with one type of paper, and then switch to the other type of paper. Mixing either the size or type of paper in the input tray means you cannot have the proper paper settings selected for both types of paper, which leads to jams.
8. Always remove foreign objects from the paper before printing. This is especially true if you are printing on a form and not a blank sheet of paper. Remove any paperclips, staples, sticky flags or other objects attached to the paper before putting the paper in the printer’s input tray. These objects can strip off of the paper and lodge in the rollers inside the printer, causing a jam that stops the print job until you find and remove the offending objects.

If you experience a problem with your laser printer that you are unable to fix on your own, contact us here at Great Lakes Computer. We provide laser printer repair for business (sorry, no residential), and the first hour is on us!

Interested in reducing your printer expense compared to printer support provided by your OEM?

We provide Managed Print Services, handling all of your printing functions, plus repair and maintenance for the same amount or less than you are paying now! Take advantage of this FREE ASSESSMENT to find out how you can save the money and frustration of printer repair and maintenance issues:

May 2, 2012 By Bob Martin

Computer Repair: How to Troubleshoot a Wireless Router

By Lysis

Computer Repair Linksys Wireless Router A Linksys wireless router is a popular brand used in the home for networking several machines. The routers provide Internet access for several home machines, including wireless computers such as laptops. Whether it’s your first time setting up the machine or you suddenly lose connection, there are some basic steps used to troubleshoot and identify the issue.

Reboot Your Router

The easiest way to fix some problems is rebooting the router. Similar to rebooting a machine, rebooting the router refreshes the memory and removes any intermittent data corruption issues. The Linksys router has a power cord connection at the back of the device. Remove the power cord for five to ten seconds and place it back into the router. Wait approximately a minute and attempt to connect to the router again.

Check Wireless Settings

The Linksys router has a configuration console that can be used from a web browser. Open a web browser on your machine and enter “192.168.1.1” into the address bar. Enter your administrator user name and password. By default, the router is configured with a blank user name and the password is “admin.”

Click the “Wireless Settings” tab at the top of the window. This displays your current wireless settings. If your router runs on the same channel as a neighbor, interference may be an issue. Change the router’s channel in the drop-down labeled “Channel.” You can also change the wireless router’s access point. If your computers have older network cards, change the “Radio Band” drop-down box from “Wide – 40MHz Channel” to “Standard 20MHz Channel.” This provides connectivity with older network cards.

Remove Any Filters

Click the “Security” tab in the router’s console. This tab provides a list of any filters you have configured on the router. Filters restrict access for some computers, so they are unable to connect to other areas of the network or the Internet. Remove filters to ensure you are not inadvertently blocking your own machine from the rest of the network.

Reset the Router Settings

The last resort for any Linksys router user is to reset the device’s configurations and start over. This means that the settings are reset to factory defaults, and you need to reconfigure the Linksys. A red reset button is located on the back of the Linksys. Press and hold it for several seconds. The router is returned to factory defaults, which eliminates any unknown settings that are causing the data blocks.

These few troubleshooting steps are useful for basic identification of typical router issues. If your Linksys router has faulty hardware, a new one needs to be purchased. However, troubleshooting allows you to fix issues and can save you money from purchasing a new device.

Still Need Help?

If you are a small or mid-sized business and are in need of computer repair and maintenance, we can help. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, Great Lakes Computer provides computer repair and maintenance to businesses just like yours throughout the United States (we do not service residential).

Learn more about our business Computer Repair and Maintenance Programs.

If your business has grown to the point where you would benefit from a dedicated help desk and a team of professionals on call 24/7, ready to help with any of your IT needs, consider our Managed IT Service options.

May 1, 2012 By Bob Martin

Cloud Computing: 7 Myths About System Backup and Disaster Recovery

Understanding Backup and Disaster Recovery in Virtual Environments Means Knowing Fact from Fiction.

In this whitepaper, Eric Siebert, VMware vExpert, dispells the most common myths about Backup and Disaster Recovery in virtual environments.

How certain are you that you know the real facts?

Data backup, server backup, and disaster recovery are necessary areas that all companies must deal with to ensure that their most valuable assets are protected. While implementing a system backup solution may seem easy, it often becomes a challenge to implement and maintain an approach that you can count on to recover data when needed. Virtualization technology further complicates things, potentially disrupting your ability to protect your data center.

Make sure you have your facts straight when looking for software to protect your virtual environment. Virtualization is still relatively new technology and there is often a lot of confusion with it as it represents a drastic change from traditional server architectures.

Removing the mystery that sometimes surrounds virtualization will help you make informed choices when choosing a backup product. Data protection requires you to understand the technologies and methods needed to implement the product to ensure that it does more than just meet your requirements. It should exceed them and provide you with extra value and efficiency. AppAssure was designed to deliver that and more with uniﬁed data protection for your virtual, physical and cloud infrastructure.

AppAssure is the #1 unified backup & replication software for virtual, physical and cloud environments. This multiple award-winning and customer-proven software recovers virtual and physical servers, applications and data in minutes instead of days or hours, and deduplication costs will be a thing of the past.

AppAssure is the only “all-in-one” data backup and disaster recovery software for both physical and virtual environments that saves time and money by:

- Performing backup and recovery 12 times faster than traditional backup solutions
- Reducing storage costs by 80% with built-in data deduplication
- Consolidating disparate backup and recovery solutions to recover from any type of outage
- Eliminating data loss caused by long backup windows through incremental forever snapshots
- Simplifying the management of your backups

AppAssure’s innovative and groundbreaking technologies assure 100% reliability of recovery and goes beyond just protecting data to protecting entire applications. It also supports multihypervisor environments including VMware vSphere / ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. AppAssure is an Elite VMware Technology Alliance Partner and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

With more than 6,000 customers, partners and service providers in over 50 countries and over 3,000% growth in three years, AppAssure is the world’s fastest growing backup software company as ranked by Inc. Magazine.

Contact Great Lakes Computer to find out about special discounts on AppAssure Software for Great Lakes Computer customers!!

April 24, 2012 By Bob Martin

Cloud Computing: Meeting Compliance and Security Standards

Compliance and the Cloud

Posted by M. Ursula Herrmann
Crain’s Cleveland Business Guest Blog Post of 4-20-12

Cloud Computing Compliance Cloud Computing presents some great cost saving and efficiency benefits to most businesses, but we continually advise clients to exercise care when moving their data and applications to the Cloud. A good example – compliance and adherance to industry regulations can be even more problematic if you’re using providers in the Cloud. This blog post from Crain’s Cleveland Business covers:

- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (aka PCI DSS, or just PCI) regarding credit card processing
- SAS 70 Certification
- CSA CCM (Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Controls Matrix)

Follow this link to Crain’s Cleveland Business to read the full post: Cloud Computing Compliance

Cloud Computing Compliance If you are interested to learn more about finding IT solutions “in the cloud,” we highly recommend this book from Dell as a must-have guide. Chapters include:

- Defining Cloud Computing and Software as a Service
- Benefits, concerns, privacy regarding using resources in the cloud
- Cloud computing security
- Migrating to and integrating Cloud IT Solutions
- and more…

April 23, 2012 By Bob Martin

Cloud Computing: What to Consider When Moving to The Cloud

Head into the Cloud

Posted by M. Ursula Herrmann
Crain’s Cleveland Business Guest Blog Post of 4-13-12

Cloud Computing Compliance Cloud Computing can make sense for many businesses, even those formerly communicating with remote workers via VPN. But as mobile workforces become more prevanlent, mobile security and cloud security need to be carefully addressed. This blog post is the first in a series from Crain’s Cleveland Business, and reviews some basics about moving your data to the cloud. It covers:

- What is the cloud, and why you need to be aware of security issues.
- The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)
- The CSA’s CCM (Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Controls Matrix), a tool designed by the CSA to help you assess the security posture of different cloud providers.

Follow this link to Crain’s Cleveland Business to read the full post: Cloud Computing Security