Introducing our new Online Support Centre

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We are excited to announce the first phase of our Online Support Centre. This new tool enables our clients to submit support requests more easily and includes the added benefit of tracking all past issues and solutions.

Once you sign in, a complete history of all active and closed issues will be available for viewing. This can be extremely useful to review past solutions to similar problems. Account managers will also have the ability to view all incidents logged within their organization.

Don’t worry if you have not yet received an invitation to log in to our Online Support Centre. Login credentials will be sent to you upon receipt of your next support request.

The Online Support Centre can be accessed from our main navigation menu (in the top right corner) by hovering your pointer onand clicking on theoption.

JuneBug – Life. Daily.

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We were very excited when Jacinta, a friend and old colleague asked us to help develop her new blog. She worked closely with one of our favourite artists at Hinge Design – and a very simple design was chosen.

This blog has a bunch of neat little features that are quite ingenious! For example, the header includes a couple of welcoming sentences, but if we take a closer look, we find that it’s automagically fetching the current season, day of the week, weather conditions (from Environment Canada), and Jacinta’s Twitter feed!

We really loved working with Jacinta on her new project and look forward to getting the opportunity to do it again one day!

You can find her blog at www.juneyjunebug.com

4 things to look for when buying a new computer

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Looking for a new computer while getting your money’s worth can be a very overwhelming task. Big box retailers can add to the confusion while trying to understand why one computer is twice the price as a similar machine right next to it. Asking the on hand “expert” behind the name tag to explain the difference is often responded with: “uhhh.. it’s better”.

We hear about these bad experiences a little too often – and while purchasing a new system from us will ensure that you get the best system at the best price – shopping around in today’s economy is never a bad idea. In order to help you with this task, we present you with our first buyer’s guide to help you understand and purchase a machine that won’t break down on day 366 or become sluggish in no time.

  1. Do not get a processor lower than an Intel i3. Stay away from Celeron, Core 2 duo, etc as they are older and slower technologies (no matter what the sales rep tells you). Look for i3, i5 or even an i7 processor.
  2. Do not get a computer with less than 3GB of RAM. For the simple reason of lowering costs, some manufacturers are selling computers with as little as 2GB of RAM. While this happens to be the minimum requirement for Windows 7, your computer will seem sluggish in no time.
  3. Don’t be fooled by large hard drives. Hard drives are a cheap upgrade. In most cases, a 320GB hard drive is more than enough for the average user. You could easily store over 50,000 songs or pictures using an 8MP camera.
  4. Watch out for the low end computers. (Home entry level grade). While their stats may look deceivingly good, they are built with low end parts and encasing. While at first this won’t seem to be a big deal, with time, little things will start to go such as the hinges on your laptop’s screen getting loose, causing your screen to “flop” around.

Refer IT

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In the last four years, Avenir IT has grown to four technicians supporting forty five small businesses in Winnipeg, Steinbach, Saint Agathe and Saint Norbert. This growth is entirely thanks to the word of mouth of our happy customers.

To express our gratitude and encourage personal referrals, we are rewarding you with a $25 credit for every residential referral and $85 credit for every business referral*. This credit can be applied to anything that we sell, including labour, new laptops, desktops, cameras, and so much more.

Here’s how it works: have your referral mention your name when they call us, or let us know ahead of time when your referral will be contacting us. Upon a successful sale, we will automatically credit your account – and send you a nice thank you note.

We look forward of growing our business and better serving you.

*As you can imagine, we can only reward successful referrals that lead to a sale. Credit must be used within 180 days.

It’s Movember

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It’s Movember, the month formerly known as November, which is dedicated to growing moustaches and raising awareness and funds for men’s health. Avenir IT has joined the movement and our staff will be donating their upper lip to the cause for 30 days. Our Mos will spark conversations, and no doubt generate some laughs; all in the name of raising vital awareness and funds for prostate cancer.

Why are we so passionate about men’s health?
* On average men live 4-5 years less than women
* 1 in 7 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime
* 25,500 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year in Canada

We invite you to support us by donating to us at http://mobro.co/avenirit.

Thank you in advance for supporting our efforts to change the face of men’s health. All donations are tax deductible.

Avenir IT saves a small organization $14,000 a year on phones

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In 2010, we were asked by one of our clients to look into getting them a new phone system. Their goals were quite simple:

  1. Upgrade their current phone system
  2. Save money

The final results amazed them – and us.

The first phase of our project involved meeting different telecom companies and hearing their sales pitch – the end results were always the same:  great technologies, not so great savings.

A decision was then made to go with an in house product using their internet connection and open source software. While this article is not to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, we can say that in the past year, they have had excellent results and savings.

Louis Allain, director general of CDEM had the following to say: “The VOIP system installed by Avenir IT is effective and has allowed us to save money.  Avenir IT’s services have allowed us to save $9,000 in the first year of operation. We expect to save no less than $14,000 per year in the years to come.”

What’s DAT file?

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You’re bound to have received a mysterious .dat file attachment in your inbox at some point and time. What is it and why are you receiving it?

This type of attachment is usually caused by the sender using Microsoft Outlook in Rich Text Format (RTF). Rich Text Format is used to help conserve the senders text formatting – such as their font, font-size, alignment, etc. The problem is, not all email clients support this particular version of RTF, meaning that you end up with an attachment ending in .dat (often called winmail.dat).

There are a couple things you can do when you receive such attachments. If you know what the attachment is supposed to be, you can try renaming the file (not forgetting the extension) to whatever it was. If you were right, then the file will open with no issues. Otherwise, you can ask the sender to resend the email with their Outlook’s message formatting set to plain text. Here are instructions on how to do so in Outlook 2010:

  1. Click on File -> Options
  2. On the left, select “Mail”
  3. On the right, scroll down to the “Message format” section
  4. Change the “When sending messages in Rich Text format to Internet recipients:” to “Convert to Plain Text format”.

Dell Inspiron Duo review

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I had just returned from a week long holiday, when Sean – our senior technician seemed so excited, I thought perhaps they had moved the International CES Convention to Winnipeg. Instead he showed me Dell’s announcement of their new Dell Inspiron Duo now available in Canada. Part tablet, part netbook, part genius?

We saw the potential in this little device, and purchased one to demo to our clients. I’ve now had the opportunity to play with it for 3 days, and here are my thoughts so far:

First Impressions
The device is slick, and feels very sturdy. It definitely packs a wow when converting it from a tablet to a netbook. Now, some of you may say that there is nothing new here, tablets have been around for ever. The difference is the maneuvering of the screen, and the multitouch screen capacity. Older tablets (before the days of the iPhone and iPad) required a pen – while this one is a finger multitouch.

Using the device
A concern for netbooks is often the awkward size of the keyboard. While the keyboard is not a full size keyboard, it is however large enough to type comfortably. I am currently writing this article on this little laptop and have yet to accidentally hit the wrong key with one of my fat fingers.

A picture of "daddy" painted by my 3 year old daughter.

The tablet comes preloaded with Dell Stage – a screen of shortcuts of sorts to ease your application selection when in tablet mode. Dell Stage automatically loads when you convert the netbook to tablet mode. The pre configured shortcuts including: Internet, Bookstage, games, Musicstage, Photostage, Videostage, and Paint. While the lack of configuration options for the Stage is a disappointment (I would rather use Firefox than Internet Explorer, or Kobo instead of Bookstage), I can see it being useful for the typical user. You can always remove the option of automatically loading up Dell Stage and simply select your programs using the touch screen from the start menu or desktop shortcuts.

One of the applications available through Dell Stage is a Paint program. The Paint program is a neat kid’s program where you can paint and color using your finger – so I got my 3 year old daughter to test it out. What was supposed to be 10 minutes of “have fun and tell daddy if you like it”, quickly became “I’ll give you a sucker if you give me back my laptop”.

Screen and Touch interface
The tablet screen at 10” is a prefect size for watching the latest episodes of the Office – and hold comfortably when laying down on the couch or in bed. It felt comfortable to hold, and much less awkward then laying a heavy 15” laptop on your lap.

The touch screen is surprisingly accurate, addictive and useful. Even in the netbook position, I often find myself tapping the screen instead of using the touchpad to click a button. The touch screen seems to have it’s place for tiny netbooks.

Tech Specs
Currently the Dell Inspiron Duo is not customizable (with the exception of casing color, and warranty). It comes with the following factory defaults:

  • Intel Atom Dual Core N550 (1.5Ghz)
  • Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit
  • 2GB DDR3 SDRAM
  • Integrated Intel video card
  • 10.1” display (1366×768)
  • 320GB SATA hard drive
  • 1.3 megapixel camera
  • wireless network
  • 4 cell battery that can last up to 4 hours

As with other netbooks, it has no DVD drive, however has the following ports:

  • Microphone
  • Headphone
  • SIM card slot
  • USB 2.0 (x2)

The device weighs in at 3.39 lbs.

Où est le site en français?

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Nous sommes et serons toujours une fière entreprise bilingue supportant les communautés francophones du Manitoba. Nous assurons que tous nos techniciens sont bilingues et puisses supporter nos clients dans la langue de leurs choix.

Nous avons dû faire une décision difficile durant le développement de notre nouveau site web. Un site web dynamique, avec des articles, opinions, produits et plus – un site qui évidement prendra beaucoup de temps à maintenir. Et cette décision était de ne pas traduire chaque section / articles du site web. Vous trouverez ici et la certaines articles francophones – mais la majorité seront en anglais. Ce qui pourra être lu par tous nos clients bilingue ou anglophone.

Vous pouvez vous assurer que tous nos communications avec vous resterons en français, et que notre priorité reste toujours la même : Offrir un service informatique exceptionnel dans la lange de votre choix.

Merci!