Most Valuable PC Upgrade

Seras provides information technology solutions and services to businesses and consumers throughout the greater Columbia SC area - including Lexington, West Columbia, Irmo, Blythewood, and even out to Camden, Sumter, Orangeburg, and Newberry.  We receive many requests from customers to diagnose slow start up times on computers or slow performance in general.  We check for viruses, sufficient memory, and then the hard drive - age, space, and size.

SSD - The way of the Future

While many problems are solved through adequate cleanup, virus protection, or memory upgrades; one of the best values is in hard drive upgrades.  Most have heard of the old business equation:

Quality (Benefits) / Price = Overall Value

If the price goes up, the value goes down.  If the quality or benefit goes up, then a better value is created.  When it comes to upgrading your hard drive to a solid state drive (SSD), it becomes apparent that this is one of the most valuable upgrades to your PC.  Take a look at the following:

• Traditional hard drives use a spinning disk similar to a record player, which can break down or get very hot
• Excessive heat shortens the lifespan and performance of a computer
• The reduction in overall moving parts reduces the amount of energy used by your PC
• Instead of moving parts, SSDs use "flash memory" similar to RAM, but unlike RAM, SSD memory remains even when the unit loses power
• Simple functions have dramatic increases in speed such as getting reboot times down to 20 seconds versus 3-5 minutes, browsing the web, and launching programs

Testing

Everyone wants things faster and more reliable, but how do you prove the change in speeds.  Check out this test performed by www.howtogeek.com with the SSD on the top and a Traditional Hard Drive on the bottom:

Prices for SSDs have dropped considerably over the last year or so with options in the $50.00 range!  This rounds out our equation - showing that prices have gone down and quality is going up.

Replacement

Adding or replacing the hard drive is easy as most desktop computers have more than one hard drive tray.  Simply power down the machine, insert the SSD into a secondary drive bay and use the old hard drive as a backup for storage.  In other cases, you may need to clone the data from your old drive to your new SSD.  Laptops are more complicated.  Some of these steps may be a bit complicated for newbies and Seras is glad to help.  Contact us here if you would like more information!

Disaster Recovery: Are you protected?

Seras provides computer and IT support throughout the greater Columbia area including Irmo, Lexington, West Columbia, and many other areas.  Among our many services are networking, computer repair, cabling and installation, server upgrades, full network monitoring, and yes: Disaster Recovery Plans.  

Devastating fires have destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses across the Southeast - how prepared are you?

Imagine that you have been worriedly watching the news for weeks and finally get the terrible news that your town is being evacuated.  As you hurriedly try to secure your family, valuables, and protect your personal items, how do you prepare your business so that in the aftermath of the disaster, you can get back to work and rebuild?  Over 90% of businesses use some type of on site backup option, BUT less than 40% of businesses use an off site backup service to secure their data from flood, fire, or other natural disaster.  So...as you prepare to evacuate, you are now tasked with loading computers, external hard drives, or other backup devices and making sure that they have been properly shut down and are stored properly until they are needed during recovery.

Fortunately, if you are located in the greater Columbia, SC area, Seras can help with BOTH electronic AND hard-copy backup systems.

Things are never as simple as "sign me up" for the "standard package".  Each business utilizes varying methods of operation and generates varying sources of confidential, critical-operating, or proprietary data.  For example, a law firm may generate hundreds of boxes of closed paper files every year that need to be kept secure for a minimum of seven years.  The South Carolina bar has stated that electronic records retention is acceptable "as long as it does not affect the integrity of the client information".  However, simply scanning records and saving them on your server does not secure them from damage in a disaster such as flood or fire.

Seras can scan your records for you and the great news is that our IT division can help to provide a solution for the electronic data as well!

Here is another example: A financial management firm creates no paper records, and works with a web-based financial management software.  They also create a few in-house Microsoft Office documents within the office, but most critical information is maintained by their software provider.  This firm's situation is much different than the law firm's, and Seras understand this.  Two completely different disaster recovery plans are implemented based on strategic factors for business continuity.

For a free evaluation of your disaster recovery plan, contact us here today!