Practical IT advice for small businesses — problems our team has fixed, explained plainly.
A client called us on a Monday morning: nothing in the office worked. Not “the internet’s slow” — nothing. No network, half the desk phones were off, one workstation was stuck on a boot screen that never finished loading. A storm came through Saturday night, and by the time anyone was back in the building, … Read more
The fan’s running loud for no reason. The browser homepage has changed from what it was. A program opens on its own. This begs the question everyone eventually asks: “Do I have a virus?” Most of the time, the answer is no — an old machine with too many browser tabs open. But sometimes it’s … Read more
Click a shared document in the middle of a meeting for a quick look and instead the whole screen jumps into a full Teams-embedded editor, loading, asking to sign in again. Somewhere else, a half-typed chat message vanishes because the channel got switched before it was sent. None of this is exactly a bug — … Read more
Late on Friday afternoon, an email arrives from “the owner” — out at a meeting, can’t talk, needs a vendor payment sent today before the account gets suspended. The tone is right. The signature is right. The request is urgent but not unreasonable; e-transfers happen often enough. The bookkeeper has the bank portal open before … Read more
Onboarding a new client starts with a question, not a technical task: what do you have? Which computers, which logins, which vendor accounts, who has admin rights to what. More often than our team would like, no one has an answer. Not because the business is careless — because their previous IT company never handed … Read more
The warning pops up in the middle of saving a document: “This PC is running low on storage space.” No explanation of what’s taking up room, and now you have a decision to make that doesn’t have an easy answer. Pay for more online storage, another recurring bill for as long as you keep the … Read more
Someone on your team works from home two days a week, connects to the office VPN, and never thinks twice about it. Same setup for years — log in, green padlock, done. And it’s exactly the kind of setup attackers have been going after hardest. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security keeps putting out the … Read more
A renewal notice comes with a new line item: cyber liability coverage. A few hundred dollars a year, easy to discount — the same instinct you’d use on an extended warranty upsell at checkout. A fee that mostly pays for someone else’s peace of mind, not yours. Good instinct. But wrong. Before writing off the … Read more
An employee leaves. Their account is disabled the same week — routine offboarding practice. Eight months later, someone needs a contract that person negotiated, or an email thread that explains why a project went off the rails. And they go looking. The mailbox is gone. The OneDrive folder is gone. Nothing was deleted on purpose … Read more
A customer call started with a hardware quote. “It seems our server’s at end of life. I’ve got a quote on my desk for two new ones — hardware, licences, data migration, it’s more than ten thousand dollars. Can you take a look before I sign it?” This is a twelve-person professional office. There’s an … Read more