LSeven Solutions Blog

The 2012 holiday online shopping season is shaping up to be the biggest yet. Harris Interactive conducted a survey regarding this holiday season, and found that 51% of Americans plan on shopping online this year. Everybody has different reasons to shop online, 71% of respondents thought they could find better deals, and 31% want to simply avoid the crowds.

Studies have shown that fatigue-related productivity losses and workplace accidents can be extremely detrimental to a company's production, and ultimately, its bottom line. In fact, a 2010 study done by internationally-renowned fatigue management expert Dr. Mark Rosekind and his colleagues found that fatigue-related losses at four U.S. corporations they surveyed totaled about $2,000 per employee annually. There are some options open to an employer to make certain that he or she gets the highest level of productivity from his or her employees.

How many different programs do you have open in Windows right now? Three? Five? More than ten? The more programs you have open at once, the longer it takes to close everything down. And what if you find yourself in a storm and need to shut down everything before a power outage strikes?

Every business is striving to grow, but with growth comes new challenges like hiring new staff. If you have a growing business model, then you likely achieved this by adopting smooth procedures. The same principle applies to growing your staff; and with solid on boarding procedures in place, you can get more performance out of your staff.

Laptops are like the Grape-Nuts cereal of computers. Just as a Grape-Nut is neither a grape nor a nut, so it is with laptops, they are not designed to operate sitting on top of a lap! Of course, using a laptop on your lap is not going to immediately ruin your computer, but habitual lap usage can shorten the life of your machine.

The recent tile interface overhaul of Windows 8 is groundbreaking enough to spawn entirely new computer designs and devices. The Windows 8 interface makes a desktop PC feel more like a mobile tablet, therefore Sony took the next step and combined a tablet and a desktop with the Vaio Tap 20.

Over the past two decades, the Portable Document Format (PDF), developed by Adobe Systems, has become the industry standard for clean and secure documents. There are many PDF-viewing applications available across the various app markets. However, you can't go wrong with Adobe's sleek-looking and versatile PDF reader, Adobe Reader X.

Are you ready for Halloween? Beyond having a cute costume picked out; we want to know if you are prepared for a disaster brought on by ghosts, ghouls, goblins, or ogres. Battling the dark legions can escalate quickly into a full-blown crisis, and as your IT Company, we view it as our duty to help you prepare for the worst.

Have you ever been working on your computer when suddenly a wild error appears? If you need to better explain your problem to tech support, snapping a quick screenshot can be super effective.

The week before the launch of Microsoft's Windows 8, Reuters reported that many businesses view the launch as a non-event. Corporations are generally slow to adopt new systems, taking 12-18 months to first test a new platform before implementing it. Many businesses do not see any additional business functionality with Windows 8, and write it off as a consumer product.

October 26th is the launch of Microsoft's new OS, Windows 8, and the world seems disoriented at the dramatic overhaul of a traditionally predictable product. To make things a bit more confusing, there are actually 3 different versions of Windows 8 being released. You should know the differences between each one before purchasing your next Windows operating system.

Does it sometimes feel that business is going well, yet your bottom line is taking a hit? If time is money, then downtime is anti-money, and downtime may be your biggest budget buster. To help you determine exactly how much your IT downtime is costing you, we have two mathematical formulas you can apply to your business.

Earlier this week we talked about ways to shave your IT budget by combining your servers with a process called virtualization. This can equal big savings when you are running multiple single-task servers. Another way businesses can save money is by migrating their entire server infrastructure to a managed cloud environment.

Using a strong password with complex combinations of letters and numbers will go a long way in protecting your account, but passwords provide only one level of protection against hackers. Additional levels of security can be added with multi-factor authentication. This is the best protection available for your internet accounts, and major technology companies have recently made this a reality for the public.

Most companies will look at ways to save by spending less on products and services, like downgrading to store brand cola when budgeting. These cuts are never popular and have been known to insight office mutinies, "Dr. Thunder, are you kidding me?" Before you deprive employees of premium products, first take a look inside your server, it may be full of savings!

It's the information age. If you are always on the go, or you work as a member of a team, it helps if your work is accessible remotely. The ability to have relevant files on hand is nice and at times can be essential to the welfare of your business. Below are a few cloud-based options that could offer you or your company a solution for your remote file access needs.

Last time, we spoke about password security, we went over the importance of using strong passwords to avoid identity theft. In part two, we will discuss three easy password solutions that can help you manage all of your different passwords.

A weak password makes identity theft easy for hackers. You would never paint your social security number on the side of a truck and drive around town, but if your password is shared, left out in the open, and used on multiple sites, then you might as well ride shotgun with the Lifelock CEO (his SSN has been stolen 13 times).

Stories about smartphones getting wet usually have a funny twist to them, unless it is your own device, in which case the story is comparable to a Shakespearean tragedy. Whether your toddler threw your iPhone in the toilet, or your Galaxy S3 took up swimming, there are a few tricks you can try before dropping cash on a new device.