I’d like to introduce you to some of the methods and techniques we use for insuring system uptime. I’m going to introduce some rather advanced technical concepts, and if that’s not your cup of tea, I suggest you talk to someone else here. Besides, it should be my job to worry about all the technical details, not yours.

Well, I might as well be talking to myself at this point, given that I probably just cleared the room. No matter, lets press on.

Depending on the task at hand, we implement a variety of often under-utilized tools and techniques. I want to highlight my personal favorite for this example. One of the common plights of a windows system is that it will, in its default configuration and pared with a user of average technical ability, degrade in performance overtime. Interestingly enough, from our experience locking down the system is often more trouble than it’s worth (large offices running on a domain, excluded). Not to mention that users often sneak undesirable applications (such as Limewire and other P2P sharing applications) onto business machines.

To solve this problem we often allow the user to run as administrator (or at least privileged), but cache all changes to the boot volume and disregard them at regular daily intervals; meaning essentially that the computer is always at the same state was when the caching was enabled, since no changes to the computer are saved. This is not new technology; software such as deep freeze performs a similar function. The difference being that deep freeze usually breaks Windows Update (it doesn’t discriminate and will disregard updates at the regular interval) and that deep freeze costs a pretty penny.

We use Windows Steady State, originally developed by Microsoft as the Shared Computer Toolkit. Steady State does a remarkable job (when configured correctly) of keeping the computer running like day 1, while still discriminating to keep user files and system updates (it might be a worthless computer if the user lost all of their files on reboot). It’s also extremely inexpensive, given that it’s completely free (that’s my attempt at humor).

That is only one example of a brilliant piece of technology that we will put to work for you. I could go on for pages (and would be happy to do so), about some of our other neat tricks. So feel absolutely free to contact us.