Blog

Recently, we had a client who needed to setup 30+ laptops for their employees. The plan for this client is that once all of these laptops are deployed, we can have a couple of imaged laptops ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. They’ll already have the standard apps necessary installed and we can spend just a few minutes customizing it for the particular user and overnight it to them. This is a handy backup plan to get a remote user online quickly in the event of a major problem on their machine. Now, anyone who has ever setup a single computer knows that it isn’t very difficult to setup […]

We come across many small businesses who use the “boss’ nephew” IT support model. The boss’ nephew is good with computers, and comes in every now and then to remove a virus, add a printer, or help with user issues. He works part-time somewhere else, so he can’t make it out during normal business hours. He only comes out when something major happens, so the office is “on their own” for day-to-day issues. He setup a backup but isn’t responsible for checking it. He setup a secure wireless network but didn’t leave the password. Does this sound familiar? Does it leave you with the uneasy feeling that nobody is really […]

We’ve deployed Google Apps for dozens of businesses, large and small, and have encountered a lot if heartburn and headaches as well as sighs of relief. We decided this would be a great techblog post to shed light on some of the recurring issues that seem to arise when we move people to Google Apps. The key benefit to Google Apps is that it is 100% cloud-based (or, it is meant to be), eliminating the maintenance and configuration nightmares of on-site exchange servers. Back in the day, everyone had an SBS with Exchange, had to manage spam filtering, incoming and outgoing firewall configurations, SMTP relays, remote users connecting over HTTP, […]

Recently we have had a slew of MacBooks come into the shop all having the same issue with hard drive failure. After taking their macs to the apple store, where they are told the drive has failed and there is nothing they can do.  The customers then approached Charm City Networks for their data recovery needs. After inspecting the hard drives and not hearing any physical issues with the drives, we were able to mount the drives on a local windows file system and access them. After copying a few files over during the recovery process, a few errors would pop up showing read/write errors not allowing all the files […]