The Information Technology Team are the unsung heroes of today's work place. You may not always see them or know everyone in the group. You may never see them come in during the morning, because they have come in early before everyone came in and they left late at night well after everyone went home. All the upgrades and the improvements that your computers and network needs has to be done with minimal disruptions during the day. So all those upgrades have to be done late at night. And if it breaks while being done then the IT team has to stay there until it's fixed. Sometimes that's an all nighter.
You may walk past their desk and see papers all askew and see them staring intently at their monitor. You may wonder if they are working on something or just reading about the next installment of The Walking dead. Believe me they are working. They might be looking at multiple monitors and be looking at multiple things at once. One screen may have a chart showing the network performance as things go to and from the office via the internet off your network. The other may have a desktop display of a server in another state and the person is trying to figure out why it keeps rebooting when no one asks it to. IT people have a lot on their plate just like everyone else. Lots of times they are working on 2 or 3 things at once because they have so much going on. Especially if they are understaffed like many are. Companies do not like to spend as much money as they should on IT because they feel there is no return on investment. If only they understood that all that time the IT crew spent upgrading the network really does make a difference for the performance of people being able to get to their information faster. If only they knew that expense for that new backups server already saved data that almost was lost because a server crashed during a busy budget time. You cannot put a price on some of that data so its hard to show a dollar expense for it.
IT people constantly have to think ahead and anticipate possible issues. If you see an IT person deep in thought they may be wondering about that small glitch in one server that makes the printer stop printing at times. It hasn’t happened in weeks but the IT person is thinking about it and trying to figure out what causes it to stop it before it happens again. IT people sometimes stay up laying in bed wide awake wondering about why something broke that day and what caused it and how to fix it from happening again. IT people have to think on their feet and when faced with multiple issues at once they must be able to figure out the one to go after first that is the most critical. You may not think that issue is the one that should be looked at first but there is a reason why they went for it first.
If you have a decent IT person at your company then make sure you thank them for their hard work. A good IT person is hard to find and they just want to know someone appreciates the work they put into keeping the IT running smoothly.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Toshiba Tecra A50 Laptop review
My HP laptop that I have used for the last 3 years for work was getting old but still running well. We just got a refresh of Toshiba laptops which is our company standard. So I traded mine in to check the toshiba out and it has been a good trade off. Gone is the bulky tecra a50 of last year and in its place is a sleek light weight machine that has a lot of great features for its price point.
The Tecra A50C is powered by an Intel Core i5-6200U CPU. Mine is clocked at 2.30GHZ and comes standard with 4 GB of DDR3 ram. I was able to upgrade to 8 GB of ram to make sure all my server and cloud usage would not tax the machine while on the road. There is a 500GB Toshiba hard drive for storage and it is 7200RPM and works very quick to shuffle data around and has a great transfer rate. An Intel chip set powers the network connections which includes AC capable WiFi and gigabit Ethernet for being wired into the network.
On the left side you can see you have your Ethernet port along with 2 USB 3 ports and the head phone jack. A slim line DVD Burner completes the line up for the left side items.
On the right side you have your ac adapter plug in which is a smaller power brick to keep weight down. Then you have a fan vent for cooling along with your VGA and HDMI inputs for monitors and projectors. 2 more USB 3 slots round out the right side and then a SD Card slot for memory cards. They did away with the worthless dust cover for the SD card slot which is a good thing, one less thing to get lost as you transport your laptop to and from.
The keyboard has been completely redesigned and the key spacing is very well done. HP has always been number 1 for me with keyboard layouts but this toshiba really shines when you need to do some heavy typing. Also gone is the horrible track pad of old that used to click randomly even if your palms sat no where near it. The new track pad is a full featured pad that has built in right and left click buttons and feels very fluid and smooth to move and click with. There is also a track ball and keys if your used to the track ball coming from a Lenovo laptop. Both work very well to move around the screen and the amount of mis clicks is very minimal. Im just now getting used to the scrolling which makes more sense to scroll with 2 fingers on the pad rather than one finger on the far right of the pad as HP used to have setup.
The lower part of the laptop below the track pad has a very well placed finger print reader that works very well once setup. You can use Toshiba's finger print software to manage log ins or you can use Windows Hello which was very easy to setup and execute. Did I mention the keyboard is backlit? That alone sold me on swapping my laptop. I sometimes sit in bed at night with the laptop (Yeah I know blue light is killing my sleep and all...) And being able to find the keys and see them easier is very convenient. Most laptops at this 800-900 dollar price point should have this feature and some do not.
Lets discuss the one thing that is my most important feature in a new laptop and that is the battery life. It has to get me 6 hours or more to win my approval and my old laptop only did that with the help of a larger capacity battery that was bulky and added more weight to carry around. Thankfully this laptop is powered by a 45 Watt 4 cell battery that can achieve 6 hours of usage with medium screen brightness which is more than easier to see while typing away. The charge time can be long as now I ran the battery completely down for the first time and the chart is telling me it will charge fully in 2 and a half hours. The battery is removable so you could buy an extra to keep with you for long travel if your not going to be near an outlet for a while.
There is DTS studio sound and the speaker is very loud and crisp. No tinny sounding videos for the traveling professional! The screen is a 15.6 inch HD TFT LED Backlit screen and has 1366x768 screen resolution and supports 720p content, 16:9 aspect ratio. Pictures and videos are very clear and crisp and the Intel video chipset has a world of features if you want to tweak color settings and gamma options. There are also plenty of power settings that can be used to tweak the most juice from the battery to keep the laptop going longer when away from a power source.
The laptop has the docking station connector on the bottom and is compatible with the same docking station as last years model which is a savings of not having to buy a new docking station.
The laptop configuration that we order comes with the Windows 7 downgrade installed and the discs included if you want to upgrade to Windows 10. Being that my home desktop runs windows 10 and has no issues I did a quick backup of Windows 7 and upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as I setup the machine. My settings for my profile carried right over and the performance of the system felt very snappy and bug free. I have been using the laptop heavy for the last few weeks and it has not given me issues yet.
Did I mention its light? A mere 5 pounds which is a great thing when travelling. I already have a lot of weight with my extras in my bag and this will help keep the shoulder from complaining much when carrying around the laptop in the bag. Its light enough to walk around with and hold to look at the screen if there is no table or chair to rest it on while working. The build quality feels very solid and the tecra series was always well designed for long life and usage for the business professional. Some might say "why no touch screen?" Well our configuration we build we opted out of that as its not needed in the line of work we are in and it would possible confuse some of our end users while they were working in the cloud. I am also not sure that I personally would use it that much.
All in all this is a very solid laptop and a great value to purchase and use if you need a lighter laptop and something that is durable and will last for some time.
What are some of your favorite models laptops that you use for work? Comment and let me know.
The Tecra A50C is powered by an Intel Core i5-6200U CPU. Mine is clocked at 2.30GHZ and comes standard with 4 GB of DDR3 ram. I was able to upgrade to 8 GB of ram to make sure all my server and cloud usage would not tax the machine while on the road. There is a 500GB Toshiba hard drive for storage and it is 7200RPM and works very quick to shuffle data around and has a great transfer rate. An Intel chip set powers the network connections which includes AC capable WiFi and gigabit Ethernet for being wired into the network.
On the left side you can see you have your Ethernet port along with 2 USB 3 ports and the head phone jack. A slim line DVD Burner completes the line up for the left side items.
On the right side you have your ac adapter plug in which is a smaller power brick to keep weight down. Then you have a fan vent for cooling along with your VGA and HDMI inputs for monitors and projectors. 2 more USB 3 slots round out the right side and then a SD Card slot for memory cards. They did away with the worthless dust cover for the SD card slot which is a good thing, one less thing to get lost as you transport your laptop to and from.
The keyboard has been completely redesigned and the key spacing is very well done. HP has always been number 1 for me with keyboard layouts but this toshiba really shines when you need to do some heavy typing. Also gone is the horrible track pad of old that used to click randomly even if your palms sat no where near it. The new track pad is a full featured pad that has built in right and left click buttons and feels very fluid and smooth to move and click with. There is also a track ball and keys if your used to the track ball coming from a Lenovo laptop. Both work very well to move around the screen and the amount of mis clicks is very minimal. Im just now getting used to the scrolling which makes more sense to scroll with 2 fingers on the pad rather than one finger on the far right of the pad as HP used to have setup.
The lower part of the laptop below the track pad has a very well placed finger print reader that works very well once setup. You can use Toshiba's finger print software to manage log ins or you can use Windows Hello which was very easy to setup and execute. Did I mention the keyboard is backlit? That alone sold me on swapping my laptop. I sometimes sit in bed at night with the laptop (Yeah I know blue light is killing my sleep and all...) And being able to find the keys and see them easier is very convenient. Most laptops at this 800-900 dollar price point should have this feature and some do not.
Lets discuss the one thing that is my most important feature in a new laptop and that is the battery life. It has to get me 6 hours or more to win my approval and my old laptop only did that with the help of a larger capacity battery that was bulky and added more weight to carry around. Thankfully this laptop is powered by a 45 Watt 4 cell battery that can achieve 6 hours of usage with medium screen brightness which is more than easier to see while typing away. The charge time can be long as now I ran the battery completely down for the first time and the chart is telling me it will charge fully in 2 and a half hours. The battery is removable so you could buy an extra to keep with you for long travel if your not going to be near an outlet for a while.
There is DTS studio sound and the speaker is very loud and crisp. No tinny sounding videos for the traveling professional! The screen is a 15.6 inch HD TFT LED Backlit screen and has 1366x768 screen resolution and supports 720p content, 16:9 aspect ratio. Pictures and videos are very clear and crisp and the Intel video chipset has a world of features if you want to tweak color settings and gamma options. There are also plenty of power settings that can be used to tweak the most juice from the battery to keep the laptop going longer when away from a power source.
The laptop has the docking station connector on the bottom and is compatible with the same docking station as last years model which is a savings of not having to buy a new docking station.
The laptop configuration that we order comes with the Windows 7 downgrade installed and the discs included if you want to upgrade to Windows 10. Being that my home desktop runs windows 10 and has no issues I did a quick backup of Windows 7 and upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as I setup the machine. My settings for my profile carried right over and the performance of the system felt very snappy and bug free. I have been using the laptop heavy for the last few weeks and it has not given me issues yet.
Did I mention its light? A mere 5 pounds which is a great thing when travelling. I already have a lot of weight with my extras in my bag and this will help keep the shoulder from complaining much when carrying around the laptop in the bag. Its light enough to walk around with and hold to look at the screen if there is no table or chair to rest it on while working. The build quality feels very solid and the tecra series was always well designed for long life and usage for the business professional. Some might say "why no touch screen?" Well our configuration we build we opted out of that as its not needed in the line of work we are in and it would possible confuse some of our end users while they were working in the cloud. I am also not sure that I personally would use it that much.
All in all this is a very solid laptop and a great value to purchase and use if you need a lighter laptop and something that is durable and will last for some time.
What are some of your favorite models laptops that you use for work? Comment and let me know.
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