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Tackling IT Administration from a MacBook Pro

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Recently, I was given the opportunity here at Tech Solutions NC to try out a brand new MacBook Pro as part of a focus group.  This is something that really intrigued me, so I signed up for it.  Last week, I received the MacBook Pro, and am now in the process of testing it out.

First, a little background information.  The computer is a Mid 2015 MacBook Pro, with a 15″ screen, Retina display, 2.5 GHZ Intel i7 Processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

For the computer itself, it is incredibly responsive, quick, and does just about everything I could ask of it.

Well, that was a short post, wasn’t it?  Well, I’m not quite done yet.

Using a MacBook Pro in a Windows Environment

There are a few things related to the environment that I am in that do make things a bit problematic for the MacBook Pro.  Most of these are common sense things, but still, if you are considering making the switch from a Windows system to a Mac system, and you manage any sort of IT environment, these are things you’ll probably want to consider.

Remote Administration

Like you would expect, on a Mac OS X system, the options for connecting to a remote system are suited primarily for connecting to other Mac systems.  Fortunately, though, the Microsoft Remote Desktop app is available, it’s free, and it makes connecting to a Windows system pretty seamless.  Search in the App Store for Microsoft Remote Desktop or click the link.

Office 365 Apps

For many businesses, Office 365 by Microsoft is the tool of choice for productivity software.  Unfortunately, though, while Microsoft has released 2016 versions of their software through Office 365 for the Mac environment, not all the apps are created equally.

The biggest issues I’ve had with this new laptop is related to how Outlook 2016 for Windows works verses how Outlook 2016 for Mac works.  There are some significant differences that I’ve documented here.

  • The CRM I use for my business is from Hubspot.  I came across them over the Internet, and knew them from other stuff, but had never used their CRM.  The good news with Hubspot is that they have a plugin that you can install in your Outlook 2016 for Windows program that will log the emails you send to your clients to the client account you have setup in your CRM.  The bad news, though, is that, due to limitations with Outlook 2016 for Mac, such a plugin does not exist, so you can’t seamlessly log those emails to your clients.
  • One workaround for this problem is to just BCC the address that logs the email in your CRM.  Doing so is fine, and is what I do right now, but I’d prefer a simpler way to do that rather than type it each time.  Of course, I can set a rule that automatically BCCs the correct address, and I may do just that, but I’d rather not have to do that.
  • The only other thing with Outlook 2016 that isn’t quite up to my standards is the calendaring portion.  Since my mail is driven through GSuite, my calendar is also, and the calendar for Outlook (either version, really) just doesn’t handle Google’s email very well.  This is definitely something that Microsoft and Google should work on.  The good news, though, is the the built in Calendar app for Mac OS X works all of my email and calendars really well, and I’ve not had any issues with using that.

Having just started working on this MacBook Pro, there are other things that I’m sure are not as good from an IT perspective as they are on the Windows platform, but I haven’t run across them yet.  The great news is that, by and large, operationally, there has been very little I have had to do to utilize my MacBook Pro in a Windows environment, and still be able to perform the IT tasks that I need to do day in and day out.  That, my friends, makes this testing a win in my book.

What do you all think? Are you able to perform IT administration work on a MacBook Pro or other Mac system?  Let me know your thoughts on what works well and doesn’t work well, and thanks for reading!

Upgrading your laptop to a Solid State Drive

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Solid State Drive

Have you ever been intrigued by the idea of opening up your laptop, taking the hard drive out, and replacing it with something else entirely?  In today’s post, I’m going to talk about the process I used to replace the hard drive that came with the laptop when I bought it — a 5400RPM 1 TB hard drive — with a new 1TB Solid State Drive (SSD).  Hopefully these steps will help you decide if it’s worth it to you to upgrade your hard drive to a new Solid State Drive.

What is a Solid State Drive?

In a traditional hard drive, the drive itself contains metal disks, known as platters, that spin at a certain RPM speed.  For most hard drives, they’ll spin at 5400RPM, some spin at 7200RPM, and some even spin at 10K RPM.  As they platters spin, there are parts known as drive heads that read and write data to the hard drive so it can be used or recalled later.  All of this generates heat, as well as takes time, so often the hard drive is the slowest component for why your computer runs slower.  Also, with the heat generating aspect, eventually that heat will cause degradation of the hard drive, which leads to disk crashes and loss of data.

In a Solid State Drive, or SSD, though, the hard drive is composed of memory chips instead of platters.  Since memory can be read from and written to at a much faster rate than a hard drive can be, a SSD is much faster than a hard drive, thereby improving the performance of your computer instantly for only a small investment of time and money.  The rub with SSD drives had always been that you paid more for them because of the newer technology, and that you didn’t get as much storage space with an SSD as you did with a traditional hard drive.

Replacement Steps Overview

Here is an overview of the steps I performed to replace the hard drive in my Toshiba Satellite L55D-C laptop:

  1. Research the size of the drive required and the steps to open up the laptop.
  2. Purchase the SSD drive.
  3. Clone the existing hard drive to the new SSD drive
  4. Install the new SSD drive
  5. Boot up the computer with the new drive

Most laptops have space reserved for a 2.5″ laptop hard drive.  A standard hard drive for a desktop system is bigger, usually 3.5″, but for laptops usually they are 2.5″ form factors.  A quick Google search for my laptop pointed me to all sorts of information on how to disassemble the laptop.  For the Toshiba, there are 12 Phillips screws that need to be removed and set aside. They are all the same length, but this isn’t always the case, so I suggest keeping them aligned to where the screw came out from so you can put it back in later in the same location.

The Mushkin 1TB SSD can be purchased through NewEgg or NewEgg Business.  I bought it through their Business line, for home consumers, you may need to purchase it from NewEgg.  The price on NewEgg is $259.99 for the 1TB drive.

Cloning your existing drive

There are probably a million and one ways to clone a drive, for me, the easiest way was to keep the original hard drive in the computer and connect the new SSD to the computer using an external USB -> SATA enclosure.  They make a ton of different ones, the one I have I like because you just plug the drive into it like you are putting an 8-Track tape into a player and it sits while it works.  Once you have done this and turned it on, you should be able to format the new drive so it can be read in Windows.

At this point in the operation, you’ll have your existing hard drive appearing, most often as drive C in Windows, and your new SSD showing up as a different drive letter.  At this point, download and install the program EaseUS Todo Backup Free 10.0, I’ve linked to it for you so you can grab it easily.  They have versions for Windows or Mac, I am running Windows 10 so that’s what I downloaded.

Solid State Drive

The process is fairly simple, here’s what you do:

  1. Run the program if it isn’t already running.  If prompted by User Account Control, click yes to allow the program to run.
  2. Click on the icon labeled “Clone”.
  3. The Source disk is the existing hard drive, click on that checkbox and then click next.
  4. The Target disk is the new SSD, click on the checkbox that relates to that disk and click next.
  5. You’ll see a summary of what you are doing, click Proceed.
  6. Lastly, click OK to the warning message “The data on the destination disk will be lost.  Do you want to continue?” to start the process.  Click cancel if you change your mind.

The time required will vary depending on how much data there is and the size of the disks, but it appears to work well.

After the cloning is completed, power down the laptop, open it up to get to the hard drive, and replace it with the new drive.  After that is complete, close it all back up and put the screws back in place, and lastly, boot up the system with the new solid state drive.

I have seen an incredible performance boost on my laptop by doing this, and I think it will help anyone looking to get more life and usability out of their system.  I did this specifically for my laptop, but this process also works for desktop systems with just a few variations.

If you want to discuss with me getting this done with your system, reach out to me, I’m here to help!  Call me at 919-606-6725, email me at mike@techsolutionsnc.com, leave me a comment on this post, send us a Tweet, or message us on our Facebook page, whatever is easiest for you!  Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Saving a Contact Group in Outlook 2016

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Outlook 2016
Image ©Office.com

Have you ever received an Outlook 2016 contact group from someone and weren’t sure how to handle saving it into your contacts so that you could use it?  I know that I have, and others I’ve worked with have as well.  You would think it would be as simple as opening the group (which usually arrives as an attachment in an email) and saving it.  In fact, as this screenshot shows, “Save & Close” is one of the options available to you.

Outlook 2016

But the key here is at the top, with the red arrow pointing at it.  It’s the dreaded “Read-Only” message, hiding in plain site like malware hidden in a steganography file. What that tells us is that, no matter how many times we click the “Save & Close” button — over and over and over again, we’ll never save that contact group into our contacts.

So, how do we get around this?  Well, there may be multiple ways around this, but for me, the simplest way for me is this.

  1. Open the message up in it’s own window.  So, when you do this, you’ll have one window with your main Outlook program running, and another window with the mail message that contains the contact group.
  2. In the main Outlook 2016 window, click on your contacts.
  3. Switch back to the mail message with the contact group, and click and drag the attachment to your contacts in the main Outlook window.  The contact group will be created in your contacts, and all of the names and their email addresses will be there.

So there you have it, a simple way to add a contact group from someone else into your Outlook 2016 contacts.

NOTE: Another option for doing the same thing is to drag the contact group directly to the contact icon.

Save

Alert: Phishing Attacks via Text Message

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Text Message

Today I received a very unusual text message.  In the message, I was notified that my “account” was disabled, and that I should go to the link in the text message to unblock the account.  Just like any email phishing attempt, there are things here that you can decipher to give you clues about the message to determine it’s legitimacy.

Text Message

Look to the following tips when determining whether a message is legitimate or not:

  1. First of all, I turned my phone sideways in order to realign the screen in order to pick out more details.
  2. Ask yourself whether or not you have a Wells Fargo (in this example) account.
  3. Take note of the information — the domain is actually cityinno.com, not wellsfargo.com.  That’s a red flag right there.
  4. Look at the account ID — usually an account ID is a username, not a series of numbers.  Of course, that’s not always the case, but usually it is.
  5. Note that, while the link in the text message does reference wellsfargo.com, it is not an encrypted website.  The link is http://, not https://, and thus, isn’t secure.
  6. Lastly, one trick you can do on your smartphone is to hold your finger on the link.  This will show you whether the link referenced actually goes to a different website.  In this case, it doesn’t, but if it did, you would see a window with the domain listed.

Most people realize that a smartphone often has an email address associated with the phone number.  So, while this message came in via my text message app on my phone, it was actually emailed to me, as the email address in the details screenshot reveals.  Despite that, the message reminds us that we can receive phishing attacks from any device, whether it is our laptop, desktop, smartphone, even something like an iPod Touch or an iPad.  Anything that can connect to the internet can be susceptible to a phishing attempt, so keep that in mind when you see a link in a message.

Do you seem to receive an unusually high number of phishing attempt emails? If so, I can help — just reach out to me via email at mike@techsolutionsnc.com, phone at 919-606-6725, or make an appointment via our online appointment page.

Patching your computer – what’s the big deal?

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Patching

When it comes to your computer, regardless of the platform, it’s only as good from a security standpoint as it’s latest patch.  Patching your computer is a crucial component to our defense-in-depth policy for staying secure in today’s online environment, so let’s go into greater detail why patching your computer is important.

As computer programs have become more advanced, the number of lines of code — the commands that make up a program — has increased considerably.  As that complexity has increased, the chances that something could be manipulated within the code to allow access to a computer system has increased as well.  When someone takes advantage of some code in a program, that is called an exploit, and the program is then known to have a vulnerability.

When a computer program, whether it be a program like Microsoft Word, or the Windows OS, or even Apple OSX or iTunes has a vulnerability, the maker of the program will write a fix for that vulnerability, called a patch, that fixes the problem so it is no longer an issue.

The more complex a program is, the more likely it will have vulnerabilities, and sometimes, even though the patch may fix one vulnerability in a program, it may not fix all of the vulnerabilities, or it may even expose a different vulnerability altogether.  So, because of the complexity of our computers, it is vital that we take responsibility on our home computers to make sure that they are patched regularly.

In looking at my laptop, which is running Windows 10, in addition to the operating system, which will have it’s own series of patches over time, there are currently well over 100 applications installed on the laptop.  Many of these are part of the OS, and some of them are patches that have already been installed — but despite that, there are a lot of programs, and each one of them could have a vulnerability, or multiple vulnerabilities, that could become a problem down the road.

That is why patching your computer is an extremely important task to stay on top of.  The good news is that often the OS will check for patches automatically and let you know of new updates to install.  Additionally, anti-virus makers also often check for updates to programs for you, so you have multiple ways of being updated.  It is possible, though, to disable these protections, so check periodically to make sure something hasn’t done that.

Do you have any issues in patching your computer?  I’m here to help.  Reach out to me via email, phone, Facebook, LinkedIn, or schedule an appointment here on the website, and I’ll be glad to help you.  Thanks for reading, have a great day!