Tech Tips

Goodbye, Mr. Bell….

Since 2019, the FCC has issued two orders changing the telecommunications landscape in the US.

• Order 19-72A1 gave telecommunications carriers permission to abandon support of outdated copper POTS lines. 

• Order 10-72A1 mandates all POTs (Plain Old Telephone, or copper) lines in the US be replaced with alternative service such as fiber or wireless connections by August 2, 2022.

How does this impact healthcare?  Most healthcare organizations already converted to alternative technologies for their phone systems, and recently many more implemented e-faxing from their electronic health record. For faxing outside the EHR, however, most healthcare organizations still rely on POTS lines.

Unfortunately, reliance on analog technology requires extensive manual labor, significant operational expense, a never-ending paper-intense workflow, updates to fax devices and much time spent scanning and uploading documents.  Internet faxing is less costly, more efficient and adaptable to all kinds of workflows.

Wait to take a bite of that new, shiny Apple….

Apple released a slate of annual operating system updates for essentially all their devices, bringing lots of new features and functionality.  If you can wait, we suggest always holding off on consumer device upgrades until the first “.1” update happens.  The “.0” upgrades often have bugs and can be problematic, and the “.1” update usually follows within a week or two.  

Till Format do us Part(ition)

It used to be wiping a desktop/laptop and reloading it with a clean OS was a simple task.  Nowadays, however, things are different.  Consumer hard drives often come with at least 2 partitions, sometimes 3.  Should you decide to wipe your machine, you will need those additional partitions because that is where the operating system stores recovery and installation files.  DO NOT DELETE/FORMAT THOSE.  

In another twist, Windows Certificate Of Authority (COA) is oftentimes digitally embedded on the motherboard. So you cannot just use any Windows media to restore the PC.  It is much safer to initiate a hard drive wipe and reset by entering the Setup or BIOS system when the device boots.  If the Windows PC is still bootable, you can enter Windows Advanced Boot Options to wipe the machine as well. 

Crawl, Walk and then RUN your PC

If you notice your PC running slow, it could be because every installed application has a startup agent.  According to application developers, this allows programs to run faster when opened. However, as you install more applications, those agents consume memory and slow your PC to a crawl.  To get your PC back into the marathon, go to the search field within Windows and type RUN and press Enter. Then type msconfig (Enter). Click the Start-up Tab, and you can uncheck the items you do not need to run every time the PC boots. Alternatively, you can click "Open Task Manager", sort through enabled agents, and disable as you please.