This error message appears and prevents you from completing your backup. It can be easily and quickly fixed by following the guide below.

1. Open Sage
2. Click Help
3. Select About
4. Choose the tab System Information
5. Write down the data path and close the sage application
6. Open Windows Explorer and Navigate to the path you just wrote down
7. Open the folder in the path called ACCDATA
8. Look for the file called QUEUE.DTA
9. Right click QUEUE.DTA and select rename, change the name to QUEUE_OLD.DTA
10. Close Windows Explorer
11. Open Sage Accounts
12. Run your system backup

We provide IT Support and Outsourcing solutions to small and medium sized organisations in England and Wales. Choose from onsite or remote technical support provided by Microsoft Trained Engineers.

Most businesses incorporate file sharing between computers; it is a simple relationship to create in a small network. When a business reaches a certain size and its employees become more focused on specific tasks, communication and shared resources starts to become more difficult and more necessary.

One of the most common question Simtech-IT gets asked is how to share diaries between team members, and the answer we almost always give is ‘centralization’.

When a business computer network reaches a certain size and the need to share data quickly becomes more necessary, the best solution is to centralize all of the data onto a dedicated server device. Managing user profiles to allow access to specific areas of the network by allocating permissions, storing all priority data in one location for backup purposes and sharing Email /Calendar accounts are just some of the ways server technology can simplify business practice.

A server can host Microsoft Exchange, which is a collaborative software program for sharing Email, Calendars, Tasks and Contacts; that works with Microsoft Outlook. Whilst other shared diary solutions are available, the great majority of them are unreliable; Simtech-IT recommends centralization and Exchange Server to most parties that enquire about shared resources, mainly due to its reliability.

The initial costs of introducing a server to your network may be higher than sourcing a software package that could be installed on individual machines, but in the long-run it will work out cheaper.

Anyone using Windows XP Service Pack 3 or a more modern version of Windows Operating System, including Server 2003 and Server 2008 (which will be almost everyone) should be aware that a security patch has been released by Microsoft that is considered high priority. The patch is documented as MS12-020 and has been developed to combat a security weakness that could allow hackers to exploit vulnerabilities and take control of a computer by sending malformed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) packets over the internet.

Microsoft has rated this threats exploitability index as ‘1’, meaning that they expect people to start being affected by this in fewer than 30 days. It is highly recommended that within a week companies ensure that this security patch is applied to all computers running RDP and are connected to the internet.

The patch is released through Microsofts automatic updates, but measures should be taken be every computer user who works remotely that the patch be applied ASAP.

The patch will be identified as KB2621440 or KB2667402 under “Important Updates” from the Windows Automatic Updates Program.

If you have any trouble applying this patch, or any issues with existing viruses; contact Simtech-IT and we can work to remove bad code and secure your data.

When your car breaks down, you call the garage and hop on a bus – it’s inconvenient but not a huge problem. When someone’s off sick, a colleague will fill in temporarily, so work can continue on a limited basis. But if something happens to your Computer Systems and you have no support provider in place, you’re staring disaster in the face.

Computers fail every bit as often as any other piece of technology. Due to age, environment, condition, etc, a piece of technology such as a DVD player, your Xbox, a Flatscreen TV, your car, they all deteriorate with age; and computers are exactly the same, and the worst thing about this is that it’s unpredictable.

If you have computers at your office and no support provider you’re very much in the same situation as a home owner with a burst water pipe who needs an emergency plumber. How long will it take to find one available? When will they be able to get to you? Will they be able to fix the problem?, and most important, what are they going to cost?

Having someone in the office who is a little tech-savvy is always great, but not always enough. Perhaps your Brother-in-Law has helped out with little problems in the past, or upgraded your Anti-Virus software; but in the event of a system failure most casual IT guys won’t know how to respond. And besides, they’ve got their own job to worry about; in my experience when a persons asks someone who thinks they know about IT to fix a problem they can’t, all hell breaks loose. Their friend doesn’t want to admit they can’t fix it and so keeps dragging the issue out with excuses about why they haven’t fixed it, or they try and make it worse in the process. Proper IT maintenance and support requires knowledge and experience you can’t get fixing your home PC by yourself.

A subscription with an IT Support Provider is an investment in your business and your customers. It’s also a weight off your shoulders! It needn’t cost much – a good IT Support company will tailor it’s solutions to meet individual customers requirements and reservations.

And at the end of the day, it’s similar to having car insurance; for a small amount of money each month, if the situation ever arose whereby your car was destroyed, perhaps with someone else’s, and you were looking at a considerable bill for the damage –  wouldn’t you be wishing that you’d taken out a policy?

In short, Windows 8 has a Metro-Style interface designed for touch screen functionality and its Server counterpart, aptly names “Windows Server 8” will be made available soon. The interface is basically a larger version of the Windows Phone operating system, and anyone who has owned a Windows phone will tell you that it’s quite good; but how will it translate onto a desktop computer?

Before I begin trialing Windows 8 I expect to be quite impressed with the ease and convenience of the system in general and I can imagine that your average user will enjoy it’s bold colours and obviousness. But under it all I’m going to be concerned; concerned that the only thing it shows me is what’s on top of the computer, where as with previous operating systems the user is expected to manage the computer themselves.

I for one enjoy the speed and availability of Windows Explorer for data manipulation, a desktop I can configure in anyway I require and the flexibility to operate my computer the way I like. My initial fear is that Windows 8 will take all that away from me, but it may be premature.

So, I have no doubt that Windows 8 will be fantastic and that home users will love it, but I’m almost certain that there will be many of us who find all that ease of use a little too restrictive.

It may come as a surprise to some parents who see their children surfing the web like trained professionals that using the internet takes practice; just like learning to ride a bike. There are dangers associated with surfing the internet which present serious risk to children’s safety, and if they are not first properly taught to keep data, identify and privacy secure whilst sharing information online they can be put at risk.

There are bodies that teach how to use the internet safely; ‘Insafe’ is a European network of safer internet centres that encourage people of all ages to consider how they interact with the internet; including social networking sites, online shopping and role-playing gaming. The group focuses on the fact that almost everyone spends some time online and the darker side of that, such as cyber bullying and paedophilia.

There is a lot of paranoia among parent groups that result in their children being banned from using the internet, and part of the Insafe groups work is to get parents and children talking about being online together and making is a natural part of family life.

Available online, the Insafe booklet ‘Play and Learn: Being Online’ is an activity booklet for four-to-eight year olds which tells of activities, give information and advice on how to be safe online. It is an excellent place to start for parents seeking to teach their children about internet safety, and to develop the trust required to let your children use the internet without constantly worrying about what they are accessing or be subjected to.

Simtech-IT is often asked by their customers how to best protect or restrict their children from potentially harmful websites, our advice is two fold:

1. Get to know how your children use the internet, and;

2. Our recommended parental control package ‘CyberPatrol’ gives parents a full suite of tools that lets them review their children’s internet usage and restrict sites that they deem harmful, with many other functions that give parents the confidence to let their children surf the web in safety.

Complete IT Services by Simtech-IT is happy to talk to parents and home users, passing on advice regarding internet safety and visiting peoples homes to install computer security features. For our business customers, many of these services we are willing to provide as complementary.

This is called Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery.

Obviously, the larger the company the larger the backup process, and smaller businesses can employ quite simple backup procedures but it’s always a concern that so many people do not backup their business data and are forced to extract their hard disks, asking if the data can be recovered.

At these times it’s really a toss of the coin on whether the data can be extracted. A failed hard disk will sometimes be accessible by special tools, but very often an engineer will be forced to tell their customer that nothing could be done; all of the data is gone, forever.

Data loss is a very common issue and can occur by various effect, split into two categories Logical Failure and Physical Failure.

Logical Failure, being the most common, can be cause due to some of the following reasons:

1. Human error, where by a user has accidentally deleted a file.
2. A power outage. If a computer shuts down un-expectantly the system file structure can be damaged, which can cause a variety of system problems, including data loss.
3. Virus attack; a piece of malicious code that has infected your computer may, as a part of its program, delete your system or business files.

Some common symptoms of logical failure within a hard disk are:

1. The Blue Screen of Death
2. If a computer fails to load Windows, it crashes and automatically reboots itself in a loop.

Physical Failure, is when a hard disks components fail. This is the more serious of the two, and bound to happen at some time. Computers have a life span and when it begins to draw to an end, hardware failures are inevitable. Main causes are:

1. Age. The older a machine, the more likely it is the components are going to fail.
2. Incorrect power supply or fluctuations in power supply.
3. Physical damage.

Some common symptoms of physical failure within a hard disk are:

1. Strange sounds coming from with the computer, clicking for example.
2. No sound coming from the computer.
3. Failure to load windows, the BIOS may no longer recognize the hard disk.

Whist it is possible to recover data from the device it has been lost from, it is not an efficient practice. IT professionals can charge a great deal for the amount of time and effort it can take to repair a faulty drive, and they might not even get any data from it.

Being prepared is the best way of equipping your business to survive a situation where data may go missing from your systems. Backup and restore processes start simple, and even large businesses who handle lots of data can have a simple solution, provided it is sufficient and maintained regularly.

If you’d like to investigate your businesses backup and recovery processes, contact Simtech-IT. We will be happy to do a free site survey and deliver a free report telling you how well prepared your business is to react to accidental data loss.

Employing industry standard protection methods like Anti Virus programs that check data coming into your network, or Firewall technology that guards against known threats and blocks unknown or suspicious incoming traffic is a must for any user, home or business, who wants to protect the integrity of their network. If any of the features you access on the internet became available to a group of hackers, well, it’s a situation no-one wants to find themselves in.

The issue here is that this group of hackers has compromised a program designed to allow remote users direct control of a computer. This does not just give the hackers the ability to access the computer and attempt to steal data, it gives them the ability to take control of it; accessing any part as if they were sat down in front of it. And that is just as serious as it sounds.

Further more, because if the nature of this program, most users will only be loosely aware that it is installed onto their machine. As a tool designed to allow network administrators maintain and fix computers at a distance, the user very often isn’t aware that it exists as it generally runs in the background.

This is the reason news of this has been circulated on the BBC news website, and fast followed up by many technology columns trying to get the message out.

It is for exactly this reason that outsourcing IT functions is becoming a common part of running a small business network. Every computer is vulnerable to some kind of attack, and not everyone is trained to monitor and combat these attacks.

Having fixed fee monthly rolling IT support contracts is a traceable, affordable and professional way of releasing yourself of the worry from such attacks. Or at the very least, proving relief that if something did happen someone would be on hand to take care of it.

CompleteITServices by Simtech-IT monitor and maintain security risks for businesses of all sizes; one man bands with a single computer to companies with almost 75 users, and we are equipped to support larger groups. Regardless of how big your company is you should take internet security seriously and put measures in place that protect you from the risks associated with todays online world.

With prices for a comprehensive IT support service from Simtech-IT as low as £178.60 + VAT per year, everyone can afford professional IT technical support and consultancy for their business.

As a general rule, businesses aim to begin replacing computer hardware every 4 – 5 years. This is a policy that ensures computer efficiency is kept to a level were business does not suffer due to slow loading times or more regular software failures and crashes. It also ensures that as standard Microsoft Windows operating system platforms change, the software your computers are running does not get left behind.

Over this time period there are several simple methods of keeping system performance as high as possible and many free tools available on the internet to help do this:

Removing Old Programs

From a computer running Microsoft Windows XP, click [Start > Control Panel] and fro the control panel windows, double click the “Add or Remove Programs” button.

The ‘Add or Remove Programs’ window will list all of the application currently installed on your computer. The more applications, the slower the system performance! Scroll though the list and click the ‘Remove’ button for the ones that can be removed.

***Do not remove something if you do not know what it is***

 Keeping Your Disks Clean and Organized

1. De-fragmenting your hard drives is a process by which the machine organizes all of the data it holds into the tightest file structure it can, and to create large regions of free space.

To defrag your hard drive click [Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter]

Clicking the ‘Analyze’ button will run a process to check if your disk will benefit from de-fragmentation. If the system recommends it be done, click ‘Defragment’

2. Cleaning out old files is simple. Windows has a built-in program for this, and there are plenty of free tools available from the internet.

The windows ‘Disk Cleanup’ program can be found in the System Tools folder (see above). Running it is extremely easy, just select the disk you want to clean from the drop down menu and click ‘Ok’.

3. Anti-Virus software is a highly recommended preventative measure against infection from malicious code. But there are other ways of detecting infected files and removing performance debilitation programs.

Spybot is a very popular free tool, available to download from the internet, that searches for traces of bugs that many top anti-virus programs can miss, and removes them. It is simplistic and can be configured to protect in a schedule that suits your requirements.

http://download.cnet.com/Spybot-Search-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10122137.html

MalwareBytes is another very popular free program that removes Malware,Adware, Spyware, etc that can slip by your Anti-Virus software. It is again, very easy to use and keep upto date, a great program for removing unwanted code.

http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html

Programs like these will not review your internet activity and attempt to block attacks from harmful code, they must be activated and just search through your existing files. They are both however extremely effective programs and are updated regularly to ensure new viruses are tracked and dealt with.

4. Upgrading Existing Hardware

Perhaps the most common cause of a computers deterioration of performance is its lack of system memory. The older a machine, the more data is has and thereby the less system memory to allocate to each process it is running.

Installing additional system memory is a fairly cheap and very straight forward way of increasing system performance. It is important to research which memory core to install before purchasing as memory cores are not universally compatible; once a part is found installing is a quick job and the benefits will be noticed immediately.

All of this advice, if acted upon will help your computers to run more efficiently; but it’s important to realize when a computer has reached the end of its useful lifetime and must be replaced.

Computers are just tools, and when a tool breaks you have to get a new one.

Simtech-IT procures and installs computer equipment on behalf of our customers, and due to our relationship with specialist suppliers we can offer saving on computers, laptops, servers, monitors, network equipment, printers and many other type of computer hardware and software.

As a dedicated and focused IT Technical Support and Consultancy business, Simtech-IT is meeting with new businesses to discuss their IT requirements and offering specifically tailored services at unique contract rates based on individual requirements.

These initial meetings, meet and greets, are completely non-obligatory and we only send our qualified technical engineers to ensure you receive an expert opinion. We also offer for our engineers to look into any exiting computer problems you may be having during this session; if we can resolve issues on the spot there is still no cost! If we cannot fix it there and then we will offer solution options and provide guidance on how best to achieve such a solution, again, all advice is free.

We welcome all businesses to benefit from this free service; everyone is welcome to book a meeting with one of our engineers. If you’re unsure, call anyway, we’re here to help.

As our portfolio of customers and friends grows so to does our passion for providing unparalleled quality of IT Technical Support!