HOW TO: Improve the performance of your older laptop!

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laptop

Just because your laptop is a few years old doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go and buy a new one, especially not if the hardware specification is fairly reasonable. If it can still run the latest operating system, for example, and you’re not interested in playing games on it, then read on.

The quickest and easiest way to give your laptop a speed boost is by upgrading the memory (RAM). In almost all laptops, manufacurers make it very simple for you to do this yourself in a matter of minutes, using only a screwdriver to remove an access panel.

The market leader in this (and we’re not affilliated) is Crucial. If you click onto their website you can run a tool which detects which laptop you have – be it Apple or Windows based – and tell you what memory you can fit. They tend to be the cheapest most of the time too. The tool will return results telling you how much additional memory your laptop can muster. If the version of Windows is 32 bit, upgrading your laptop to more than 4GB of memory will not make any difference as the computer won’t be able to “see” the additional memory.

The next step is looking at the hard disk. The cheapest laptops and even more expensive laptops by default still have spinning hard disks. Depending on the speed at which the disk spins at, will determine how fast the read and write speeds are.

Newer technology has since surpassed traditional spinning disk drives, and prices have come down massively. This technology is what you find in your mobile phone and tablet, and what enables most devices like that to be “instant on”, and is called Solid State Disk (SSD) as there are no moving parts. A lot of the time, this is why when you go back to your traditional laptop, you find yourself waiting much longer for things to load. It is a little bit more intrusive to replace and swap out your hard disk. You need to clone, or reinstall, your Operating System and copy the files back. There are guides for this, but we recommend you contact someone to look at this for you. The price of an SSD is somewhere in the region of £80-100 but prices are falling all the time.

Feel free to contact us if you would like assistance with replacing memory or your hard disk to give life to an older computer.

Resolved: WordPress redirect issue on multi-site config

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We recently resolved an issue that we couldn’t quite resolve easily so thought we’d share the solution.

Sometimes you just have to go back to basics and start from the beginning.

On one of the sites we host, WordPress is configured with multi-site. There was one domain in use for the site and another one parked, that we wanted to point to the same document root. We had the parked domain set to use the WordPress root of the existing site thinking that should just load, but instead we were greeted with a Registration error. Registration for the site was disabled anyway, but as you were hitting the blog from another domain, the blog didn’t know what to do with it.

After much head scratching and searching, and going round in circles with multi-site help documents, it wasn’t that at all.

We needed to add one line of code to our WordPress config file – “noblog”

define( 'NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'http://www.fightify.com' );

Obviously, replace with the domain of your main blog. The result of this is, that if you hit your site from www.site1.com you will no longer get a signup page error, but the front page of your www.site2.com domain.

And in case you’re also wondering, as off WordPress 4.5 you don’t need any additional plugin for multi-site domain mapping – see here

Beware of fake Antivirus Software!

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Total AV

One of our recent jobs involved clearing some fake Antivirus software from a Windows computer. Unbeknown to the user, they had done some research for “good” software on Google. TotalAV appeared at the top of the results list, and several review sites also cited it as being genuine and reliable. Running a search online right now, and page 1 and 2 of Google show nothing but good reviews. Majority of these are paid…

The  software was installed, but after a while the computer started to slow down considerably. The computer was virtually brand new (just a year old) and specification of this computer was also high.

We ran some 3rd party anti-malware tools, and various services and software files were flagged, at which point we did our own research on this antivirus software. As it turned out, it’s a scam. The developers of the software are in fact planting malicious content and files and from what we have read are in fact doing more harm than clearing any genuine viruses from your computer.

We advised the user to try and claim back on the money spent and we then advised to stick with Windows own built in security protection which, with Windows 10, is more than adequate for home/home office use.

Some links to back up this post:

Bot Crawl: http://botcrawl.com/totalav/

Malware Tips: https://malwaretips.com/threads/total-av-is-it-a-scam.80362/

In addition we would like to point you in the direction of this article over at Blokt, to help users to stay safer online: https://blokt.com/guides/what-is-spyware

iPhone not charging? Check this quick fix.

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The number of times your iPhone may not be charging due to it actually being faulty is fairly minimal, and more often than not, it’s the cable at fault and not the phone itself.

The iPhone 6 we have wasn’t charging and after checking the obvious we then hit Google. Some articles later, and we were lead to check if lint wasn’t to blame.

Sure enough, if you hit search you see the following results:

Lint Google Search

 

 

 

The essence of it is to make sure your iPhone is backed up, turn it off, and then use a normal toothpick to pick out any fluff and stuff that the Lightning port has attracted from your trouser pocket.  In our case this fixed the problem!

Better still, it cost nothing 🙂

For more info you can read the following: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/use-a-toothpick-to-clean-out-your-iphone/

Top WordPress Plugins you must Have!

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WordPress Logo

This is a much discussed subject but we wanted to share the must have plugins you definitely need to install having first installed WordPress.

Having a whole site running off WP is a much debated topic but the ease of use and endless addons you can install to get your site to do pretty much whatever you like, is just one of the reasons why WP is one of the most used off the shelf content management systems currently available.

  1. NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

Everyone has either a Twitter or Facebook account and the easiest way to get your blog post shared on either is by using this plugin. Yes WP does it natively, no it’s not the greatest. We use this plugin on every WP site we configure and it’s ease of use and simplicity is why it’s on our list. PS. It does share to so many other websites too…

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpshare

2. Shareaholic

Everyone loves to share content. This plugin adds cool share buttons to your blog posts and also allows you to monetize your content (optional). We’re mainly including it here due to the buttons, and the ability to customize and use URL shorteners to track click throughs.

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpbuttons

3. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore

We’re surprised that WP doesn’t have native backup tools, allowing you to backup to external cloud storage or FTP sites. We’re sure it’ll come in future updates but for now, this nifty plugin does the trick. The free option gives you the ability to schedule backups to remote storage with completion/failure notifications. A must to ensure that your site’s files and database are backed up safe and sound!

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpbackup

4. Disqus

WordPress’s built in comment system is OK, but not brilliant. It works in the most part but Disqus has been doing a better job of it for a long time. It allows better customization and many more configuration options than included with the basic WP install.

Link:  http://go.frantik.it/wpcomments

5. Askimet

Everyone hates spam, especially spam comments. We’re sure you’ve been on a site with random comments unrelated to the original post. With this installed that should reduce the amount of spam comments and allow you to better moderate comments posted to your site. This is included by default with the WordPress.com sites but if you’re setting up a custom install make sure to activate it!

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpnospam

6. JetPack

Advanced stats, sharing, and a whole load more. Most of the stuff you need to pay to get the extra features but we just like it for the additional stats. It adds this to the Dashboard and admin bar when an admin is logged in. Worth having for that alone we think.

Again, if you have a site hosted via Wordpres.com then this is included by default, but if you’re self hosting you’ll need to add it. We still think it’s worth installing.

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpjet