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Ferrum Technology Services has been serving the Elgin area since 2007, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Tip of the Week: Build Up Your IT Like an Enterprise

Tip of the Week: Build Up Your IT Like an Enterprise

The primary difference between an enterprise and a small or medium-sized business is simply how big it is. Due to this size, many of the tools used by enterprises are so powerful and dynamic that they can easily be used by businesses much smaller. Let’s take a look at what some of these technologies and processes are.

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Improve Your Business’ Wi-Fi Connection with These 3 Tips

Improve Your Business’ Wi-Fi Connection with These 3 Tips

Wi-Fi is a major part of any modern office, and when it is absent, people become painfully aware of just how much of a luxury it is. Let’s discuss some strategies you can implement to optimize the speed of your business’ wireless connection.

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Tip of the Week: How to Delete Temporary User Settings

Tip of the Week: How to Delete Temporary User Settings

How often do you run out of storage space on your computer? Hopefully, never. If you notice your computer’s hard drive is filling up but you aren’t adding a lot of files to the drive, it might be temporary files such as cookies and browser cache files taking up space.

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Tip of the Week: Shortcuts for Your Internet Browsing Convenience

Tip of the Week: Shortcuts for Your Internet Browsing Convenience

People are spending a lot of time online, especially as of late, with many working remotely and using tools and resources sourced through the Internet. In light of this, it seems to be an opportune time to review a few useful shortcuts that can help speed up one’s Internet browsing.

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Excel Shortcuts You Can Use to Be More Efficient

Excel Shortcuts You Can Use to Be More Efficient

Microsoft Excel is the premier spreadsheet software, but unless you know keyboard shortcuts and formulas, it can be tricky to get the most value out of it as a software solution. Thankfully, with just a couple of keystrokes, you too can achieve mastery over this software. Here are some of the most popular and useful keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Excel.

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Tip of the Week: How to Identify and Address Workplace Distractions

Tip of the Week: How to Identify and Address Workplace Distractions

Technology might be a great tool to enhance productivity, but we need everyone to understand that it can only do so much for an unproductive user. It’s not uncommon for users to bounce back and forth between tasks, and this can lead to unfortunate bouts of unproductive behavior. Let’s discuss some ways that you can help your team overcome these obstacles.

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Tip of the Week: Avoid Buying Into These Common Smartphone Battery Life Myths

Tip of the Week: Avoid Buying Into These Common Smartphone Battery Life Myths

Nothing says “panic mode” quite like a dying smartphone. To avoid falling into this predicament, many users keep their phones plugged in to keep the battery topped off. A common saying is that this practice is actually bad for battery life, but how much truth is there in this statement? Let’s take a deeper dive and see if we can separate the fact from fiction, as well as what factors do influence your smartphone’s battery life.

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Tip of the Week: Managing Turnover

Tip of the Week: Managing Turnover

A lot of people have wanted to do their jobs from home for a very long time. It took a global pandemic to make it happen, but over the past year, millions of people have successfully navigated remote work from the comfort of their homes. The reality of it was a lot different than what most of them expected, however. Some organizations are simply better at managing their remote workers and this, and other factors, have led to some significant turnover at some companies. Let’s take a look at the reasons for this and give you a couple of tips that will help you retain your remote workers.

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Tip of the Week: Understanding Your 2FA Options

Tip of the Week: Understanding Your 2FA Options

Regardless of how airtight your organization’s password policies are, relying on passwords as your exclusive security measure just isn’t enough to resist some of today’s threats. This is why we—along with most other industry and security experts—recommend that two-factor authentication (2FA) be put into place. Let’s review some of the options available for your 2FA, and the added security it can introduce, for this week’s tip.

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Tip of the Week: Handy Productivity Features in Microsoft Word

Tip of the Week: Handy Productivity Features in Microsoft Word

Many businesses rely to some degree on Microsoft Word as their word processor of choice. Considering this, it seemed fitting to go over some of the productivity-supporting features that Word has to offer.

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Tip of the Week: Reducing the Impact of Blue Light Exposure

Tip of the Week: Reducing the Impact of Blue Light Exposure

With each day, it seems that we all have a new threat or risk to worry about. Lately, there’s been a lot said about the dangers of blue light exposure, with lots of things to buy that supposedly help fix the problems it can cause.

Wouldn’t you know it, but blue light actually can create some issues that could negatively impact your health and wellbeing. Let’s discuss it, and what you can do to address it.

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Tip of the Week: Microsoft Word Features You May Not Have Known About

Tip of the Week: Microsoft Word Features You May Not Have Known About

If your business utilizes Microsoft Word in any way, shape, or form, there’s a good chance that you aren’t using it to its full capabilities. Let’s go over just a few of the features that the software offers that can assist you in excelling (whoops… wrong Office application) in your day-to-day responsibilities, and how to put them to use.

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Tip of the Week: Protecting Your Mobile Device Against Guests

Tip of the Week: Protecting Your Mobile Device Against Guests

Let’s face facts: there could easily be quite a bit on your mobile device that you don’t want someone to have access to. However, on the other side of the coin, you hardly want to appear rude and never let someone use your phone to place a call or look up some contact information… right? As it turns out, Android has a little-known feature called Android Guest Mode that many can use to share one’s device more securely.

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Tip of the Week: Activating Clicklock on a Laptop

Tip of the Week: Activating Clicklock on a Laptop

Laptops are pretty great. They’re powerful, yet portable computers that can be brought effectively anywhere work needs to be done. That being said, there are a few drawbacks that can irritate many users to some extent. For instance: trying to click-and-drag your cursor as you are using the trackpad. For this week’s tip, let’s go into a feature that you can use to make this process a lot simpler.

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Tip of the Week: Deciphering Your Computer’s Power Options

Tip of the Week: Deciphering Your Computer’s Power Options

Granted, you’re probably most interested in your computer when you’re using it. However, it is very important to consider what you do when you walk away based on the list found in the Power section of the Start menu. Let’s go over what each of these options actually does.

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Tip of the Week: How to Generate Strong Passwords That You Can Actually Remember

Tip of the Week: How to Generate Strong Passwords That You Can Actually Remember

Passwords are effectively the cornerstone of your business’ data security—if they aren’t up to muster, your protections could crumble. Unfortunately, many users shortchange their passwords to try to make them more convenient, also making them more convenient for cybercriminals. Let’s see how we could (and should) make passwords as effective as possible.

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Tip of the Week: Properly Preparing to Respond to a Data Breach

Tip of the Week: Properly Preparing to Respond to a Data Breach

While nobody wants their company to suffer a data breach, the nature of today’s workplace makes these occurrences harder and harder to avoid. In fact, chances are that you’ll eventually encounter one, which makes it important to prepare to deal with it when it comes about.

Here, we’ve outlined a few steps to help your business weather the storm:

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Optimizing Images for the Web 101 - Resizing Your Images

Optimizing Images for the Web 101 - Resizing Your Images

It wasn’t long ago that we took the time to discuss what format is best while you’re sharing images, whether via email or online. The idea was that images with the smallest file sizes were best, as they could be shared and downloaded more rapidly—without a tradeoff in terms of quality. Let’s discuss how this can be accomplished in Photoshop.

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Optimizing Images for the Web 101 - Image File Formats

Optimizing Images for the Web 101 - Image File Formats

Images are immensely useful tools to communicate, whether using them online or sharing them in an email. Having said that, understanding a few things about image files and their sizes will help you to use these images more effectively. We’ve put together this guide to make it easier for you to put images to their proper use.

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Tip of the Week: Three Questions to Help Arrange Your Priorities

Tip of the Week: Three Questions to Help Arrange Your Priorities

The typical workday is filled with tasks—oftentimes, more than can be handled in the span of a day and all given the same priority level. As I’m sure you’ve realized at some point, this just isn’t a sustainable way to operate. To minimize this issue, we’re going over a few tips to help you prioritize the tasks that you’re given.

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