With this in mind, the objective of this Blog Post is to highlight the potential risks involved with the upcoming end of support of these products and to outline the options available to mitigate these risks.

What is the situation and potential risk?

Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 will no longer be supported from April 8, 2014 onwards. After this date, Microsoft will not provide any public support for these products, including security patches, non-security hotfixes or incident support.

Running Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 in your environment after their end of support date may expose your company to potential risks, such as:

Security & Compliance Risks – Unsupported and unpatched environments are vulnerable to security risks. This may result in an officially recognized control failure by an internal or external audit body, leading to suspension of certifications, and/or public notification of the organization’s inability to maintain its systems and customer information

Lack of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) & Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Support – A recent industry report from Gartner Research suggests “many independent software vendors (ISVs) are unlikely to support new versions of applications on Windows XP in 2011; in 2012, it will become common”. And it may stifle access to hardware innovation: Gartner Research further notes that in 2012, most PC hardware OEMs will stop supporting Windows XP on the majority of their new PC models. See Creating a Timeline for Deploying Windows 7 and Eliminating Windows XP SP3, June 2011.

What are the available options?

1. Upgrade – This option affords customers the best return on investment by deploying a modern PC with Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2010. Whether you’re a small business or the largest corporation with offices worldwide, moving to a modern PC with Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2010 offers your business the ability to improve productivity for your employees and increase operational efficiency through improved PC security and management.

To help customers with the migration/deployment process, Microsoft and our consulting partners offer several options including proof of concept (POC) and production pilot programs, available through Microsoft Consulting Services or one of our Certified Service Partners, to help you achieve a successful upgrade to Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2010.

2. (Not realistic for Home and Small Business Users) Purchase a Custom Support contract through Premier Support to stay on unsupported products – If, for any reason, you decide to remain on Windows XP SP3 or Office 2003 after support ends, you have the option to purchase Custom Support. As a condition of buying a Custom Support contract, you must have a Premier Support agreement and we ask our customers to have a migration plan in place. The cost of Custom Support is significantly higher than regular support, and rises annually due to the rising costs of supporting a legacy product.

3. Do nothing – Microsoft recommends customers avoid this option for it can put you at risk of potential security and compliance issues.

• Amazon – Did you know it’s not just books!
• Brandstar – well we had to be in there didn’t we!
• Carbonite – Backup online .. as much as you want!
• Dropbox – Possibly our favourite cloud based file sharing tool
• EdenFarm – Children’s Village in Chingola, Zambia
• Facebook – A bit of time wasting!
• Google Docs – We are using this more than Microsoft Office these days
• HSBC – Our favourite banking service
• IMDB – The Bible of Movies
• Java – It seems we can’t live without Java .. and it seems it likes to update!
• K9 Web Protection – Protect your computers, family and/or
• LoveFilm – Brilliant .. just Brilliant! And they give you 30 days for free
• Martyreo – to bear witness
• Nectar – Be like the Bees
• Orange – We all have our favourite phone networks, Orange UK works for us!
• Plus.Net – UK Based Broadband Supplier, best of the best in our experience
• Quidco – Get cashback when you are on an online shopping spree
• Register – Tech News .. Geeks Only
• SpeedTest – Check what broadband speed you are actually getting on your machine
• uTorrent – A tiny uTorrent client .. torrents can be used for downloading things legally!
• Vimeo – It’s not YouTube!
• Wild Hosting – The best (in our opinion) hosting in the UK .. maybe the world .. but certainly the jungle!
• Xero – Online Accounting Software
• YouTube – find a video for pretty much anything!
• Zyxel – Our favourite communications equipment provider

Back to work!

Apple aren’t very forthcoming as to how you can achieve this, and their excuse is that people will copy music using Apple devices, which we kinda accept as an answer. But with all the money they pump into their R&D they really should have a way to re-sync with a computer without having to go through this .. but until they do … we have finally found a way that works, we have tested it a few times and we thought it would be nice to share.

There are other ways online, some simpler that don’t work, some that require buying software and some so complicated that we gave up!

We are PC users mainly so this is a PC solution, if you have a Mac one and want to share it then get in touch. We’ve kept it simple, follow these steps and away you go!

1. Open up Windows Explorer, and go to Tools > Folder Options > View (if the TOOLS menu icon isn’t visable press the ALT key on the keyboard once). In Advanced Settings list, under Hidden files and folders, enable Show hidden files and folders. Then click OK. You may get a Windows security warning but it’s safe enough to disregard it as we can change it back after we have recovered our music.

2. Now plug in your iPod, iPhone or iPad. In Windows Explorer, a folder will now appear with the name of your device. Double-click on it. Go to the sub-folders iPod_Control and then music. You’ll find your music there but not as you might like it, they are in random folders and without their song names. Don’t worry about this – the ID3 tags where all the data is stored are still fully intact and iTunes will pull the data out that we need.

3. Copy all the music from those iPod, iPhone or iPad folders into a new folder on your hard-drive. Move all the songs into one single folder and discard all the folders that your iPod made. By the end, you should have one folder in your hard-drive with all the scrambled files together.

4. Open up iTunes and go to Edit > Preferences. Under the Advanced tab, under the General tab, select the local folder where you have copied the music from your iPod (by clicking Change).

Check the box Keep iTunes Music folder organized and click OK. Also make sure you have wiped all previous music from iTunes so your playlists are blank.

5. In iTunes, click File then add folder to library. Select the folder where all your copied music is. iTunes will now re-import all your music. Also, because you have previously clicked Keep iTunes Music Folder organised, iTunes will now start renaming and organising your songs into their correct names, albums and folders. Clever! Please note: If you have a lot of songs in your iTunes library, this could take quite a long time.

You will also need to go back into Windows Explorer, and to Tools > Folder Options > View and reverse what you did so the hidden files remain hidden again. You may want to de-select Keep iTunes Music Folder organised if you don’t normally use that option but we quite like that option, maybe because we’re lazy.

We hope this helps you get out of those difficult situations, but don’t use it for sharing music illegally, we don’t condone that!

The plan here isn’t to do an in-depth review of each piece of software, there’s plenty of that online already. Instead we want to talk about our experience with the software, useability, features and how it protects users in reality. It is all very well having a big list of features but unless they work well then they are fairly meaningless!

AVG Family Safety

Let’s start with the negatives here, and then things can only get better.

1. One Account – Unlike AVG Family Safety this software protects the machine and you all have access to the same content, so you either lock it down for your 4 year old or you lock it down for you 14 year old, but you can’t have a profile for each user.

That might actually bit it for the negatives on the K9 software, have you guess this is our favourite yet Here’s the bits we like

1. Free – For the computer(s) in the home you can get this for free. For business or organisation use you have to pay just under $20 a year for it
2. Hidden – it is hidden, you don’t know the software us running unless you try to access a site that you shouldn’t and then you get (as you would expect) a ‘Not allowed’ page along with a reason why, which category it is in and the options to review, override (with a password) etc.
3. Simple – The user interface is effectively just a web page. You can choose a preset of categories to block, or you can customise them for yourself by just ticking the boxes. Nice and easy.

Net Nanny

What about Business Protection

You could use one of the above mentioned software, and if you are a small organisation and have good control over the computers then that is ok, if you want something to protect a network then we would recommend a different solution that includes a Zyxel Zywall and Blue Coat’s K9 Content Filter. Talk to use if you would like a quote for this.

It seems that more and more spam is being sent these days, therefore spam filters are working overtime to keep it out of our email inboxes. Unfortunately, this means that now our own emails are often ending up in other peoples’ junk folders!

It’s becoming annoyingly common; you an email, but receive no reply. You then call the person only to find that your message had been placed in their junk folder, wrongly identified as spam.

So how do we stop this from happening?

The problem we have is that there’s no way to absolutely guarantee an email message’s delivery.  However, there are several things we can do to help increase the chance of your email safely reaching the recipients inbox and not their junk-mail!
Here’s a list of some tips and tricks to help avoid seeing your messages incorrectly marked as spam. Nothing is foolproof but it is a good start:

• Don’t send spam. It might seem obvious, but if you do you run the risk of your email address being blacklisted!
• Don’t send “forwards.” These are the chain mail type emails that you probably receive from friends and family. Even though most are harmless and often quite amusing, a lot of users can get annoyed by them, and choose to mark them as unwanted spam.  Once enough unhappy people mark the message as spam, then you have a problem.
• Be careful how many people you copy in on an email. Most spammers send to huge numbers of recipients, and many still use the quick and easy method of multiple CC’s or BCC’s.  Professional email marketing programs can be really cheap, and there are loads to choose from.  These programs send messages one at a time, instead of all at the same time, and help separate your messages from all the other spammers out there. We particularly like the software provided online by dotmailer, give it a go!
• Use a professional email domain. Stay away from Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts – they’re great for personal email, but not for businesses, to start with it looks unprofessional.  If you need help setting this up give us a call!
• Avoid common spam words. Most spam messages you receive are usually about the same old stuff…loans, gambling, viagra, mortgage rates… etc. Limit your use of these words and if you do have to use them maybe keep them away from the subject line
• Avoid overdoing punctuation and capitalisation. Spammers often overuse punctuation and capital letters to try and grab attention, so think carefully about how many times you use exclamation marks in your message.
• Get white-listed with crucial business partners. What is white-listing? … it is the process of telling the spam filter which email addresses you definitely want to receive mail from no matter what they contain.  If you have partnerships with other businesses–people you’re sending email to on a regular or daily basis–make sure you have them white-list your email address.  White-listing will override most of the above-mentioned common spam identification methods and ensure your emails always get through to that person. Ask your IT support to assist…it is often something that is controlled at server level in big companies.

As I said at the beginning, nothing is fool proof, but these thoughts will help!

Visit the site and take a look! Leave us comments if you like it

The new port we are talking about is the eSata port. Why are we blogging about this new port? Theoretically this should be a much faster port when connecting an external Hard Drive to it.

USB Port

eSata Port

We regularly recommend to our clients that they implement a backup system using an external hard drive. With eSata becoming more and more common we thought we should test to see if it is a faster port in reality rather than just on paper.

So we got testing …we tested on the same computer (a Windows 7 Dell Vostro Laptop) with 3 different files and then a folder of mixed files and we timed them each three times and took the average. Probably a bit over the top but we got carried away!

Here are the results!

Conclusion … Yes eSata really is quick in a real world application and not just on paper, so if you have a lot of files to backup or if you are regularly moving files on and off an external hard drive then we would say eSata is certainly the way to go!

We hope this helps!

We’re always trying to improve parts of the Brandstar network and recently we have been working on a new support area for the Wild Hosting website. The new support site already has a more extensive knowledgebase and will be growing over the coming months with extra tutorials and user guides to help our customers get the most out of their hosting package with us.

Also we have simplified the support request process, no more usernames and passwords to remember. Just fill in the form remembering to include your account username and we will get back to you promptly.

So, take a look, and consider signing up for your hosting account with Wild Hosting if you don’t have something already!

We’ll soon be updating the style/layout of the Wild Hosting page!