Month: December 2013

Throughout this year we have been running a promotion whereby we provide all of our new Macs with a free installation of Office for Mac 2011 Business Edition. From the 1^st January 2014 we will be withdrawing the offer and be charging for this essential piece of software.

Office for Mac gives you Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook and normally retails for £210. Therefore, if you want this on your new Mac make sure you contact us before we close on the 20^th December 2013 to take advantage of this great offer.

Just when most people were getting used to differentiating between HD and Full HD, a new phrase has been kicking about recently. That phrase is 4K. If you work in the creative sector or know people that do you might have heard this term and had to nod in agreement that these new monitors were next year’s must have without really knowing what 4K meant.

Essentially 4K refers to the quality of a displays resolution. For example, a Full HD display is 1920 x 1080p, which is why it is also referred to as 1080p. A 4K display will have a resolution of 3840 x 2160 and will also be known as Ultra-HD or 2160p.

But what does this mean? In very basic terms, a higher resolution means more pixels. More pixels mean more detail. Therefore, 4K Ultra HD TVs have 8.3 million pixels while current Full HD TVs have just over two million. The result is 4K TVs have four times as many pixels than Full HD TVs at the same size.

The new Mac Pro from Apple has been designed specifically to run with 4K displays and Dell have only recently announced that they will be producing 4K displays for less than $1000. When you couple these facts that both Sony and the Television industry have been using 4K since 2006 and it seems as if 4K will no longer be a buzz word but part of our everyday language.

Earlier this month a one of a kind red Mac Pro was sold for $977,000 at Southebys. Designed by Apple’s Jony Ive and part of Apple’s RED charity raised an amazing amount of money.

However, you don’t need to have the best part of $1m to get your hands on the new Mac Pro. Launched this week our flexi-lease allows you to have one of these for just £21.60 + VAT per week.

Featuring, dual AMD Firepro GPU’s, with a choice of PCIe Flash Storage and a Maximum Ram of 32GB Ram, the new Mac Pro is a serious machine. Whilst internal storage is limited to 1TB, the external storage options are not, with a choice of fast Thunderbolt 2 storage available in RAID arrays.

As standard we include a three year warranty with telephone and remote support, plus a Loan Mac should we ever have to take yours away for repair. We also give you 250GB of free Cloud BackUp when your business leases a Mac Pro.

If you are interested in the new Mac Pro call us on 0121 285 0098 or email info@localhost

What does the end of Windows XP mean for you?

April 2014 sees the end of support for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, Small Business Server 2003 and Office 2003. What does this mean and should you be worried?

Microsoft provides three levels of support for its software products: Mainstream Support, Extended Support and Online Self-Help Support. It generally offers ten years of support for business products and five years of Mainstream Support for consumer ones. Online Self-Help Support lasts for ten years, but since Office 2003 and Windows XP are already older than that, these knowledgebase articles could start disappearing at any time.

Around a third of all PCs in the world are still running Windows XP, so it’s highly unlikely that Microsoft will remove all the patches for it from Windows Update immediately. However, there won’t be any more arriving. If anyone discovers a new security hole, and these aren’t rare, Microsoft isn’t going to be doing anything about it in future. Once Windows XP and Office 2003 go out of support, there won’t be any more patches for those products, and the likelihood of your PC catching something will increase, regardless of how good your antivirus software is.

Around a third of malware infections can be traced to missing security patches; that is, if the computer had been kept up to date, it wouldn’t have become infected. For example, Windows 7 is still far less likely to be infected than Windows XP, if you’re running anti-malware protection. Windows 8 comes with real-time protection built in and turned on by default, so its infection rates are incredibly low.

In the last six months of 2012, machines that ran a protected Windows XP SP2 had 4.2 infections per thousand, while 32-bit Windows 8 machines and 64-bit Windows 8 machines had 0.5 and 0.2 infections per thousand respectively. With no real-time anti-malware installed, these figures went up to 15.6 per thousand for Windows XP and 2.7 per thousand for 64-bit.

Security patches that are released for more up-to-date versions of Windows and Office will probably be reverse-engineered by malware writers to see whether Windows XP and Office 2003 share the same vulnerabilities; if they do, those old products will become even more at risk, since their now-known holes will surely be exploited.

The issue facing many business is that their machines are often as old as the software they are running and aren’t powerful enough to run the latest Microsoft software efficiently. This means that they are faced with a costly bill to replace all of their machinery.
However, all of our new machines come with either Windows 7 or 8 Professional. Our lease means that bringing new, secure PC’s and servers into your business is more affordable than ever. Plus, working on faster, better machines bring real efficiency benefits to the business.

If you are still running Windows XP, Office 2003 or similar software and are concerned about its impact on your business call us on 0121 285 0098 or email info@localhost

Earlier on this year, we wrote about how the iPad was on the verge of being redundant. With smaller but equally capable offerings from Google, Samsung and even Apple themselves, with the iPad mini, it seemed as if the days were numbered for the original tablet.

However, Apple then launched the iPad Air and all that changed for us. Don’t just take our word for it here are what some of the industry’s best have to say about the new iPad.

Time

Harry McCracken

The iPad Air’s best feature is the 475,000 third-party offerings tailored for it in the App Store, still by far the most bountiful collection of tablet software in quantity, quality and sheer diversity, from entertainment to Web tools to education to mundane business stuff. No competing model has anything like it, which is the single biggest reason why no other full-sized model has made much of an impact on the market.

All Things D

Walt Mossberg

It doesn’t do everything a laptop does, but for many common scenarios, it has replaced the laptop as its owners’ go-to device. Bottom line: If you can afford it, the new iPad Air is the tablet I recommend, hands down.

 

Engadget

Bard Molen

As its name suggests, the Air comes with a revamped design that sheds almost half a pound of weight, along with a couple millimeters of thickness and a significant amount of bezel area. At the same time, it maintains the same 9.7-inch Retina display that defined the last two iPads. While that’s impressive enough in its own right, Apple also managed to make the device more powerful, thanks to the same A7 chip that already powers the iPhone 5s.

 

TechCrunch

Darrell Etherington

The iPad Air is a huge improvement over the iPad 4th-gen, or the iPad 2, pictured in the gallery. Its form factor is the best currently available for a 10-inch tablet, and it provides a great blend of portability and usability that leans towards the media device end of the spectrum.

When Apple introduced the iPad mini, I fell in love and felt that I’d never be swayed back to the other side. The iPad Air makes the argument anew that there’s still room for big tablets in people’s lives, and it might just help usher in an era of computing where households own more than one kind of iPad, and PCs are harder and harder to find.

David Pogue

(Former New York Times)

It’s smaller, lighter, and faster than ever, with a much bigger catalogue of apps and much better ones, than the competition. If you want a big tablet, this is the one that will make you happiest.

Put another way, there really is something in the Air.

Prices for the new iPad Air on our Flexi-Lease start at just £3.99 + VAT per week and come with 3 years warranty and support plus an All risks insurance policy against theft and accidental damage.  If you need 2 or more iPads call us on 0121 285 0098 or email info@localhost