Tales from IT – Upgrading an Obsolete Laptop with a Solid State Drive April 27, 2017

We’re back with an all new Tales From IT, a series where Maniac talks about some of his most noteworthy computer technology repairs.  Today, we’re going to be talking about Solid State Drives (SSDs for short).

One of Maniac’s clients had an unusual desire to buy already obsolete used computers. This wouldn’t normally be much of a problem if he was using them to run legacy software, but this client expected them to act as if they were brand-new top of the line PCs just because they were “refurbished”.  After buying a laptop he was told would not work well, he called up Maniac to complain the laptop was slower than dirt when trying to run essential software he installed on it like Quickbooks.

Because the laptop was so old, Maniac’s options for improving the laptop’s speed were limited.  The RAM was already maxed out and could not be upgraded, and because it was a laptop, internal components like the CPU, GPU and Motherboard could not be upgraded at a reasonable cost.  The only option left was to upgrade the laptop’s hard drive with a SSD.

Would the new drive make the computer any faster?  Would it even work?  Watch and find out!

Tales from IT – Replacing a HP Designjet Printer Belt April 24, 2017

Printers can break, it’s just a fact of life. But what happens if your broken printer happened to cost 2000 dollars and was the size of a couch?

Maniac tells the story of a time when he had to replace the belt on a HP Designjet printer. The catch? You needed to completely disassemble every single component of the printer JUST TO GET TO THE BELT. Can he do it? How did he fix any problems he came across while replacing the belt?  Watch and find out!

Here’s the link to the belt replacement video we used as a guide to fix the printer in case you need it.

Tales from IT – Setting up Multi-User Access in Quickbooks April 21, 2017

In an all-new Tales from IT, Maniac tells the story of the first time he ever worked with a small business.

Quickbooks is an important piece of software for small businesses, and about a year ago, Maniac was asked to configure a Quickbooks database for multi-PC access. This isn’t much of an issue until you realize that his client had no Quickbooks server on his network. Will Maniac be able to do the job?  Watch and find out!

Tales from IT – Resurrecting an Essential Database April 20, 2017

We’ve got a new camera and what better way to break it in than to announce an all-new video series for this website, and we are calling this series Tales from IT!

When Maniac was growing up, he was the only person in his entire family with any technical aptitude, and because of that he has over twenty years of computer repair experience. Tales from IT is a compilation of some of his favorite IT stories over the past few years.

Today, we’ll be telling the story of an essential database left running on a decade-old PC. The owner had no computer knowledge, had no idea what kind of software they were using, and kept no backups. It was working fine until the PC eventually failed due to age, and Maniac got the call to fix it.

Did he fix it?  Watch and find out!

More Tales from IT are on the way, please post a comment if you would like for us to produce more from this series!