We’re often asked by our business customers to suggest ways of reducing their IT costs. 

The surprising answer is that they ought to get rid of as many of their servers as possible, and move to server virtualisation.

 This means using just one server, removing substantial running costs.

IT managers are sometimes sceptical about this, and ask, “What if that one server goes down?”

Well, it’s good question, but it’s not as much of a risk as you might think, for the following reasons:

1. Modern servers are very reliable
2. Our remote monitoring service usually fixes problems before you even know that your server needs attention
3. Effective data back-up combined with system-recovery solutions enable systems to be very quickly and reliably restored.

 One of IBM’s recent advertising campaigns concentrates on the company’s range of Blade Servers. You might remember seeing some of the TV commercials.

 The point of the advertising was to launch a system which made considerable savings in running costs. The system does this by consolidating many small physical servers, replacing them by one larger physical server, principally to increase the utilisation of costly hardware resources such as CPUs, or central processing units.

 Although hardware is consolidated, operating systems are not. Instead, each operating system running on a physical server becomes converted to a distinct operating system running inside a virtual machine. The large server can host many such guest virtual machines.

If you or your organisation are running a number of servers, you ought to consider a physical to virtual transformation.

 At Computer Precision, we have plenty of experience in designing and installing virtual systems as well as actually building bespoke servers.

 If you want to know more, please give us a call and we’ll discuss what the benefits are likely to be. If we need to make a site visit, we’ll do this at no cost.

Office 2010 was launched in May this year after an extended beta test.

 Microsoft says that 7.5 million people downloaded various versions, and that these generated 650,000 individual reports.

And that means Office 2010 is a very reliable upgrade for both Office 2007 and earlier versions.

 Office 2010 comes in three versions: Office Home and Student, Office Home and Business, and Office Professional.

 Reviews have been universally excellent. Technology review site Tech Radar says:

 “There might not be any one feature that you’d buy Office 2010 for, although search in Outlook comes pretty close and collaborating in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and especially OneNote through SkyDrive is compelling. But put them all together and you get a hugely powerful suite of apps that’s still easy to work with.”

 Here are our Ten Top Reasons for adopting the software which enables you to:

1. Express your ideas more visually
2. Accomplish more when working together
3. Enjoy the familiar Office experience from more locations and devices
4. Stay connected to your business and social networks
5. Get your message out instantly
6. Create powerful data insights
7. Manage large volumes of email with ease
8. Deliver compelling presentations
9. Store and track all your ideas in one place
10.  Work your way faster and more easily

 If this sounds attractive to you, come and visit us at 185 Upper Street, and we’ll demonstrate Office 2010 for free. Or call us on 020 7359 9797, and we’ll come round to your office.

 Finally, one of Tech Radar’s site visitors, Kate Lowe, put the following post on the site:

 “Microsoft Office 2010 offers some brilliant updated and upgraded features too. Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 in particular has been greatly enhanced, offering features such as co-authoring, embedding videos, the option to link PowerPoint presentations to the web as well as improved picture editing tools. A great improvement.”

We have customers who have been with us a long time.

It’s not surprising. We’ve have been in business for twenty-six years. And that, for businesses in Islington’s Upper Street, is a long time.

We’ve been in business a good longer than many marriages last. We’ve seen governments come and go, Boy Bands implode and then re-form in their middle age, and Communist China move from collectivism to vigorous capitalism.

All this from the tranquil comfort of 185 Upper Street, Islington.

We’ve been going so long that several of our customers can be referred to as digital pioneers.

Well, those frontier days have gone. We now assemble PCs in our workshop with a computing power and memory many, many times more powerful than possessed by the original US Space Shuttles.

You no longer have to worry about memory, crunching power and reliability. We’ll do that for you, especially since we can monitor the health of your IT system remotely, and can also fix a problem before you know you’ve got one. We have IT support running through us like a stick of Brighton Rock.

All this makes us wonder if there are other potential customers who’d like to meet us but don’t know we exist.

So, here’s an offer.

If you are an existing and satisfied customer, do yourself and us a favour, please.

Recommend us to a friend, colleague or relative.

Let’s say your name is John Wayne. We’ve selected this name because, as far as we know, none of our customers have this name, but who knows?

Anyway, tell your friend to visit us with a PC or laptop and say, “John Wayne sent me.” In your case, substitute your name for Big John’s

We’ll then service your friend’s machine. And we’ll reduce the invoice by 15%.

That’s not all.

For you, we’ll credit your account with £20.

Why, you might ask, is this a good deal for us?

The answer is, we very rarely lose a customer.

Two more satisfied customers

Hallo, and welcome to our blog.

At the beginning of this year, we decided to ask our customers what they thought of us. Rather than hear what they thought we wanted to hear, we decided to use an independent consultant to ask the questions for us.

We gave him a list of topics we wanted covered, names of people who might be willing to take part, and told him not to come back until he had something interesting to say.

Two weeks later, he returned. And what he told us was very interesting indeed.

Your probably know that we build our own computers. We fix your hardware when it goes wrong. We install and maintain networks. We clean your hard drives of broken links, temporary files, viruses and trojans. We maintain systems. We install new software. And we’re here, usually, when you need us.

So what did our customers say was the most important thing we do? What is it which keeps them and, possibly, you loyal?

The answer was customer service.

Here are some quotes from the research:

“If something goes wrong, I ring Woody. He puts on his running shoes and is here in five minutes. Can you imagine PC World doing that?”

“Yes, I’ve bought quite a lot of kit from them. The kit’s fine, I wouldn’t know really. But I buy their kit because I know they’ve got Motki and Woody just round the corner. I’m a customer because I know they’ll keep my system running.”

“I suppose you can best describe me as an anxious old bloke. All my business is held on a server. What do I do when everything suddenly goes quiet and there’s some message on the screen in DOS telling me the system is down? I’m in Barnsbury, and they’re in Upper Street. They can be here before my customers notice, and get me going again.”

This was a slight surprise for us. We knew that our service mattered, but we didn’t realise that our customers valued it more than any other service we provide.

So, if you have anything to say about our business, and especially about our service, please let us know. Just post a comment. We will read it with close attention.

Secondly, if you are a potential new business customer, here’s an offer to help you try our service.

We’ll give you 5 hours of IT support for a measly £99 plus VAT. This usually costs £375 plus VAT. You can use the hours any time up to 31 December. The support covers maintenance and repair both at your location and at our workshop at 185 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1RQ. This offer is limited, within reason, to the N1 area and a radius of two miles from our workshop. But we’re happy to make exceptions.

If you’re interested, just give us a call on 020 7359 9797, and ask for Vish or Benny.