Productivity

What Are The Best Ways To Give An Older PC New Life?

June 27, 2022

Purchasing a new computer is a big investment. Many small businesses and home PC owners end up struggling with older systems because they want to get as many years out of them as possible.

Have you found yourself banging on your keyboard in frustration? Have you tried every tip and trick you found online, only to still struggle with a slow PC?

There are some promising upgrades you can do that will cost much less than the price of a new computer, while making your PC feel like new again. Here are some of the options you can try to improve the performance of an older computer.

Upgrade to a solid state hard drive (SSD)

Prices for solid-state drives have come down quite a bit in the past few years, making them an affordable upgrade that can breathe life back into an older PC that might be slowing down.

Unlike hard disk drives (HDDs), SSDs do not have any moving parts and use a flash memory that allows for a quicker response time. You can improve your time to boot and your experience when searching files, opening applications, and other activities.

Some of the advantages of upgrading your computer’s hard drive to SSD include:

SSD read/write speeds up to 2500 MB/second compared to HDD at up to 200 MB/second
SSD access time of 0.1ms as compared to HDD at 5.5-8.0ms
SSDs use between 2-5 watts of energy compared to HDD at 6-15 watts

Increase the memory

One upgrade that is very low-cost and can mean a significant increase in performance is a memory upgrade. If your PC was one of the cheaper ones that only had 4GB of RAM when you bought it, you likely have trouble opening too many tabs in your browser or using any graphics-heavy program.

Upgrading your RAM, if your PC has available memory slots, to 8GB or 12GB can make it seem like you have an entirely new computer due to the big increase in speed.

Upgrade the graphics card

If you play computer games or work in any type of video, imaging, or 3D software, an outdated graphics card can ruin your experience.

Instead of replacing your entire computer, just upgrading the graphics card to a more robust model can improve your PC’s performance and give you several more useful years from it.

Replace your PCs cooling system

Heat is an enemy of your computer’s internal parts. If your cooling system is getting worn out and not working the way it should be, then excess heat can be building up inside your device.

When this happens things can get strange, with programs crashing or your system rebooting on its own.

If you suspect excess heat may be an issue, have your computer’s fan and cooling system checked out to see if it needs replacing.

Connect an external monitor to a laptop

If you’re working on a laptop and having a hard time multi-tasking due to limited screen real estate, consider getting an external monitor rather than replacing your entire PC.

Monitors are just a fraction of the cost of computers and having a screen twice the size of the one on your laptop can make all the difference in the world and improve productivity due to the additional screen space.

Replace your keyboard

Older keyboards can stick, lose keys, and have the writing rubbed off the keys, making it more difficult to tell a “prt screen” from a “delete” button. If the performance of your PC is hampered by a frustrating keyboard, an upgrade can be a very inexpensive way to improve your equipment.

Get an external hard drive

Computers can slow down and be more difficult to use when the hard drive fills up with data. Over the years, files build up, and many users never take the time to go through and delete those that are unnecessary.

Buying an external hard drive can allow you to offload files that may be slowing you down while still keeping them easily accessible.

Another benefit of an external hard drive is that it’s portable and can easily be carried between home and work and used in both places.

Get a professional PC tune-up

Those free PC cleaner tools you find online aren’t going to give you the type of tune-up that a professional IT provider can give.

We will go through things like the Windows Registry, duplicate system files, internal errors, and more to clean up your system and remove all the “junk” that has built up over the years.

We can also do a maintenance check for things like failing parts, and provide expert guidance on your most impactful upgrade options.

Don’t struggle with an older PC! We can help you with cost-effective upgrade options that will fit your system and budget perfectly.

Benefits Of Transforming Into A Paper-free Office

March 25, 2022

Going paperless at your office by digitalizing your documentation is a huge step.

Although it’s not easy for many businesses to transfer the entirety of their paperwork electronically, you can start small and shift slowly. It involves numerous benefits, such as lower costs and higher efficiency after digitalization.

In a competitive market, cutting down on expenses and enhancing productivity is an arduous task. You can accomplish these tasks easily by going paperless.

The availability of advanced technological tools is making it easy to move your documentation online. If you are still confused about going paperless at your office, consider these benefits.

Better organization
Tracking and maintaining papers manually is a time-consuming task. Your employees may find it intimidating to handle all clutter and mess when it comes to documents. This becomes even tougher when you are running a large-scale operation. Paper documents increase the risk of huge errors and blunders.

Going paperless will streamline your management and organizing tasks so your employees can channel concentration towards high-priority tasks. This avoids tedious paper hunts. You will face a lower chance of human errors and mistakes by introducing coherence and proficiency in the workplace.

Transfer information easily
Numerous available tools enable you to generate digital invoices and quotations. Hence, your employees can instantly share relevant details without incurring printing and postage expenses.

Marketing and accounting teams can communicate information in realtime and make adjustments according to their clients’ needs. Employees can easily search through old documents with a few clicks. They can arrange documents by date, clients, serial number, and nature of documents.

Enhance security
Even though cyber-attacks are frequent, digital documents have become more secure. Electronic records are easier to render through encryption.

You can control access to specific documents and manage security levels. Printed documents require a lot of space, and controlling access is not possible. Documents are also prone to fire and water damage. You can double up digital efforts with backups and cybersecurity.

Lower costs
When you transform documents digitally, you improve the process’s efficiency and lower expenses.

Digital transformation offers you to store a large volume of paperwork, saving a lot of storage space. Moreover, digitalization will reduce the cost of ink, printers, paper, employee time, and space to store the documents.

The most important benefit of going digital with your paperwork is that you save employee time. They can perform additional tasks instead of storing, managing, and searching for documents.

Should You Monitor Your Remote Workers?

March 25, 2022

At the end of last year, Microsoft announced it would be adding increased employee surveillance to Microsoft Edge.

The changes mean admins can access compliance monitoring through the browser, such as seeing which files have been printed or copied to USB devices.

Machine learning is being used to increase this visibility of what’s happening to sensitive files. But how will this impact employees? Will they feel that their privacy is being invaded? Will it cause trust issues? And do you think this is an appropriate level of monitoring when people have proved that remote work can be just as productive – if not more – than working from the office?

Our advice would be not to buy into this increased employee surveillance, unless you want to damage the delicate trust you’ve no doubt worked hard to build with your team.

There are other, more open ways to help your people get their work done. For example, there are plenty of tools that help limit distractions like notifications or temporarily block apps and websites to allow better focus. Your employees can choose to activate these to aid their productivity when they need a boost.

You’ll find some within your Microsoft 365 subscription – that means more tools at no extra cost.

If you want some suggestions personalized to your business, give us a call.

How To Hire Top Talent With Advanced Tools

February 23, 2022

Setting up the best recruitment tool can solve numerous business related problems. A major problem that almost every business encounters is hiring a qualified candidate.

According to a survey, 87% of HR professionals reported that they could not fill positions with eligible and qualified candidates.

Apart from that, many companies find it difficult to reach qualified candidates, provide a remarkable candidate experience, and maintain diversification in the workspace.

You can solve these problems and numerous others by incorporating a top recruitment tool in your human resource department. Below, you will learn some benefits of using the tools for an effective hiring process.

Online recruitment tools increase recruiters’ productivity. By shifting to advanced technology, your team will learn new methods and factors to identify the best talent.

These tools are a huge help for them to reach new people through social media. Hiring the best candidate from a long list is an arduous task. However, you can automate your tasks using a recruitment tool, thereby saving precious time and effort.

While hunting down potential candidates, communication is really important. Using recruitment tools, you can maintain efficient and time-saving communication channels, effectively keeping applicants in the loop.

Recruiting tools you should use

The hiring process is no longer a manual task for most businesses. The reason top businesses are leading in this dense and competitive environment is that they focus more on hiring the right talent.

With manual hiring, the partiality in the process has a great impact on final decisions. Even if they try not to bring their emotions into the hiring process, they make mistakes.

Therefore, it is the right time to switch to advanced recruitment tools and enhance the skills of your human resource team. Here are some popular options among top businesses:

Recruitment chatbots

Going through an interview, candidates are more comfortable communicating with an AI tool than a team member. By knowing they must communicate with the chatbots, they will be confident inbeing transparent.

With recruitment chatbots, you can schedule interviews or take tests online. AI chatbots for recruitment not only help you make better decisions but provide an amazing experience to the candidate.

AI for screening

The screening process provides essential information about candidates and compares the top applications among all. Depending on the number of applications, this process is time-consuming.

Moreover, screening hundreds of profiles of applicants will be discouraging for your employees. While reviewing applications, they might overlook things due to pressure. However, you can automate your screening process through artificial intelligence recruiting tools.

These tools will shortlist eligible candidates, effectively reducing time and cost per hire.

Reducing bias software

Recruiting teams who use artificial intelligence to recognize talent can reduce the bias from screening, sourcing, and job descriptions. These AI-based tools will resolve the conscious and unconscious bias in the sourcing and screening process. These tools do not consider the candidates’ demographics such as age, gender, and race. Rather, they focus on hiring based on talent and skills. Reducing bias from the workplace will prevail in bringing diversity among the candidates.

Traditional techniques for recruiting talent include posting ads in newspapers, and placing boards. To speed up the hiring process and recruit the best talent, integrate advanced tools in your recruitment department to attract better quality candidates.

Three Ways To Evaluate Employee Performance

February 23, 2022

A performance management system enables you to evaluate your employees and helps you bring transparency to the process. These tools facilitate you with features for engagement and accountability of your employees across the company.

Factorial is a performance management tool that enables you to track the progress of each employee. This tool helps you customize the questionnaires and assign reviewers to easily manage and evaluate your teams.

With this tool, you can generate custom reports, create employees’ portals, add features in the individual portal and send a notification to the participants. You can access this software through a browser and your phone.

You can also use Factorial to integrate different add-ons and third-party plug-ins to streamline your workflow. You can unlock numerous connector tools with Factorial if you have an account on Zapier. The tools you can integrate include Google Calendar, Slack, Gmail, and Outlook.

Initially, they offer you a 14-day free trial that helps you assess the application. This management tool includes a few limitations that might slow you down a bit.

Trakstar is a highly customized tool to assess the performance of your employees. This tool includes comprehensive features and offers detailed analysis.

The interface of this platform is user-friendly and easy to understand. The developers designed this tool according to advanced social media websites so everyone can get the hang of it.

The top features that this software includes are 360-degree / multi-rater feedback, employee engagement surveys, and task management for thousands of employees.

It also facilitates you with setting SMART goals, customizes appraisal forms, and creates a flexible workflow according to the organization’s needs.

SAP is a popular and user-friendly tool that enables you to develop and retain employees, reduce attrition, optimize benefits, drive engagement, and increase the productivity of your employees.

This intelligent tool includes RPA or AI and robotic process automation capabilities. Furthermore, you can perform embedded analytics. SAP is an expert-recommended feature that offers flexibility to your employee management.

You can customize the SAP ERP based on your business infrastructure to perform wide-ranging tasks and activities. It offers you an SAP API business hub that includes digital content packages with sample applications and APIs.

This platform offers you a 30-day free trial period. After the trial period, they will charge you every month depending on the number of users.

Tools To Improve Internal Communication In Your Business

February 23, 2022

Improved internal communication will build stronger teams, increase employee engagement, and enhance productivity.

You can build a better and friendly workplace by increasing communication between employees.

However, the main challenge is to implement an internal communication tool into your business system. Choosing the best tool among all is a difficult decision to make. Therefore you can choose among these top tools for internal communication:

Intranet is a centralized communication tool to share, gather, and access information. This is a private network that requires a web connection.

Digital Signage is a workplace communication tool that requires strategically placing screens. You can also use instant messaging applications dedicated to internal communication such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype, etc.

After implementing the tool into your workplace, ask your employees to share all information through the channel. Then, create a team or assign managers to lead the communication process.

A communication team is better than a meeting, and you can utilize it in numerous ways, including training sessions and surveys.

How Tech Solves Managerial Problems In Small Business

January 31, 2022

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Before the digitalization of the business sector, it was impossible to comprehend how easily you can perform business tasks today.

Every business industry is drastically changing by integrating new and advanced tech tools. The way you communicate with clients and other employees is different from how it used to be. This is possible because we now have tools capable of solving our problems in a better way. Here are some ways in which technology is solving managerial problems in small businesses:

Resource Planning

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, you will agree that managing your resources is a challenge. Especially when you are a start-up, you need to visualize your business process and create effective resource plans. Integrating an Enterprise Resource Planning tool into your business infrastructure is an efficient way to solve departmental problems including finance, sales, marketing, and accounting.

Reduce Workplace Stress Using Technology

January 31, 2022

Many business owners focus on reducing work-related stress to keep their employees active and healthy. This way, they can focus more on their work instead of taking leave.

Your employees should feel motivated while they are in the workspace. This way, they can evaluate and organize their life in a better way to ensure optimal work and life balance.

Why Should You Reduce Stress?

You should reduce workspace stress for numerous reasons. To know the importance of reducing stress, you must understand how it affects your employees’ physical and mental health. Consequently, it will impact business activities, hindering any progress towards long-term goals.

Reduce Stress with Technology

The main reason for workspace stress is a lack of productivity and focus. However, you can utilize technology for good, thereby reducing stressful work routines. Numerous applications are available to help your employees focus and manage their routine. Here, we will discuss some of those tools:

Project Management

Managing projects without any tools is a hectic task. Planning, prioritizing, and tracking tasks will take up a lot of your time. However, you can rely on different tools to perform these activities.

Integrate those tools, so your employees don’t feel burdened. You can choose between popular tools such as Asana and Trello.

Time Management

When your employees are unable to focus and perform tasks due to stress, they can’t practice effective time management. Eventually, this will add to their stress and pressure.

Tools such as Pomodoro are an amazing option to manage time in your workplace. When your employees meet deadlines, they can focus on other tasks or relax.

Collaboration

Other time-consuming activities involve collaborating and communicating with colleagues. You can streamline internal communication by integrating tools such as Slack, Google Drive, and Basecamp.

These tools will not only help your employees communicate with each other, but they can also share and receive files and track their tasks. Furthermore, these tools will keep your tasks and conversations organized for future reference.

Stress Relief Apps

You can introduce various stress reducing applications among employees. For instance, applications that reduce anxiety will keep your employees calm and happy.

You can share these applications that make it mandatory to relax for five minutes after working for an hour. Applications such as Mindwell and The Breathing App are popular for reducing stress.

Increasing workload and giving your employees a tough time will have a negative effect on your business. With excessive stress, your tasks will become counterproductive, and employees will lose their focus. If you want to improve employees’ productivity, start by reducing workspace stress with some of the suggestions above.

Using Technology To Maximize Your Business’ Efficiency and Communication

November 24, 2021

In today’s world, we have so much technology that we barely know what half of it does, let alone how to use it. We tend to stick to what we know and forgo the rest. However, once you understand how you can optimize the relevant tech in your business, you can radically improve efficiency and communication.

One easy way to increase your business’ efficiency and keep everyone on the same page is by using a group-based calendar.

Staff can see what the plans are for the day, who’s going to be out of the office, schedule meetings and appointments, and more. Everyone can plan their day around each other’s availabilities and come in every day knowing what to expect.

Shared drives, either on a network or through a hosting service like OneDrive for Business, can also save time and increase work efficiency.

Shared folders and drives can be divided by department (like Marketing) or use (like Scanned Documents), ensuring files can be accessed instantly in their current version by all allowed parties. You can also filter out who has access to certain folders.

If it would be a right fit for your business, it might be worth looking into a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

A CRM system does what it sounds like: it tracks your relationships with your clients. It does much more than digitize your client files; these are a powerful tool that can do a lot of heavy lifting in organizing your business, managing your clients and workload, marketing, collaboration between employees, and client satisfaction.

There are many, many webpages written on the topic and many CRM options to choose from at all different price points, so some independent research will benefit you here.

We use a CRM program at Tech Experts to track all of our clients’ service tickets, manage invoicing, build marketing campaigns, monitor statistics, and more.

Back to the tech that’s easier to implement. If you use a fax line, you may be able to switch to an email-to-fax/fax-to-email service or an online fax service.

These solutions function just like a regular fax line (make sure the provider you’re considering is HIPAA compliant, if needed) and are often cheaper than a traditional fax machine when compared. These faxes can be sent from anywhere, to multiple parties at once, and save on paper and equipment costs.

Many companies, including ours, use an online library (also known as a knowledge base) to store employee training and reference materials.

This makes it easy for both new and established employees to check procedures without having to interrupt another employee; they simply log in and find the article they need to complete their task.

Additionally, if someone does need to ask for help, they can be directly linked to detailed processes, saving time for everybody involved.

These also allow you to control who has access to what spaces. Services like this are typically browser-based, but something similar could be set up on shared network drives as well.

With the amount of people that are currently working remotely or people who will be working remotely in the future, communication is key.

Not only can these help with communication inside of your business, but also assist in communication with your customers.

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