Articles by category: Customer Education

Really Green IT Written By: Andrew West Have you noticed that everything, from companies to the products that they sell, is suddenly “green” almost overnight?  Is it possible that the same dish detergent that you bought last year is really green this year?  If you’re as skeptical as I am, it’s probably because your intuition is right on.  “Greenwas... read more

3D Technology: A Review for Home and Business Written By: Chase Christian It seems like there’s hardly a new movie released to theatres now that isn’t featured in 3D. With the huge commercial success of Avatar last year, many movie studios are jumping at the opportunity to get onto the 3D bandwagon. Commercials on television have been saturated with companies trying to sell 3D mon... read more

The Seven Types of Power Problems: Summary of APC White Paper In today’s ever evolving technologically advanced world, our dependence on reliable power has become more and more crucial to the success of businesses world-wide. With the importance of power considerations in the IT world comes the need for standardization of terminology and communication. For both consumers and IT professio... read more

Office 2010  Overview and Opinions from the Team   Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 will be released to their business partners and the general public in May and June respectively. Many of CIO’s engineers have already been testing the Beta version of Office 2010 and are currently using the released version. In this article a brief overview of the new and improved fea... read more

Written By: Mike Shinn It’s easy to get on the world’s “bad” list while everyone is sensitive to spam.  Here are some tips to try to stay on everyone’s good side and avoid getting your company’s email blocked.  It takes only one person to get your whole company on a black list. 1. Don’t send out spam.  If you are sending out a larg... read more

Written By: Mike Shinn With power outages occurring and more expected due to the power, I’ve been receiving a lot of the same types of questions and problems.  Typically we have provided or worked with our clients to make sure that their network and data are protected using proper power conditioners and battery backups.  More and more I have been asked about personal desktop pr... read more

By: Peter Trinh  In the article, Introduction to NAS: Part 1, I introduced the NAS, discussed what they are, and explained their features.  If you missed reading that article, you can easily find it here.  In Part 2 of this article, I will discuss the physical features of NAS devices along with the market segments they are meant for. There are many types of NAS devices, whi... read more

Introduction to NAS: Part 1 By: Peter Trinh This will be the first article within a series that will focus on NAS devices.  This article will introduce NAS devices, describe what they are, and discuss their features. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage.  They are essentially an external hard drive in a form of an appliance that connects to your network and currently serve an ev... read more

Do to the increasing reliance on IT, the need for support can happen at anytime, during business hours or non business hours. To respond to this growing demand CIO Solutions has invested heavily in our infrastructure to provide Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo County with options for Emergency IT Support. The heart of this infrastructure is a team of engineers that strive for the sa... read more

Your Local lT Community? Santa Barbara – I love it here.  Let’s face it – Santa Barbara is a small town by almost any standard, and that’s what makes it special, at least amongst countless other reasons such as its natural beauty, relaxed culture, delicious farmers’ market produce and world-famous restaurants, so on and so forth.  Obvious as the statemen... read more

The first job that I got in Santa Barbara was doing IT support at UCSB.  Students could buy a network card for their computers for about $150 and I would help them get it connected to something new called “the internet.”  A lot has changed.  Now, the internet is commonplace.  People typically have multiple computers in their homes as well as mobile devices that c... read more

By Andrew West, CTO CIO Solutions has just completed its upgrade to VMware vSphere, aka ESX 4.0.  In addition to the new benefits and features we are enjoying including native Storage vMotion, Distributed vSwitches, the ability to expand VMFS volumes on the fly, Fault Tolerance, simple host patch management with Update Manager, and others, we are now running on a fully redundant N+1 ... read more

Netbooks: From the Third World to the Third Cloud on the Left           The story of the netbook began in 2005 with the One Laptop per Child non-profit organization. Its mission was "To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and softw... read more

CIO Solutions can help Santa Barbara based physican practices move to an EMR Solution. This article is broken up into two parts, a brief summary and what physicans need to know before moving to an EMR and how CIO Solutions can help with this transition.   Brief Summary: As of late Electronic Medical Records or EMR has been a topic of discussion amongst Santa Barbara physican and physica... read more

CIO Solutions has been providing computer repair to the Santa Barbara and Tri Counties area since 1986. We have a dedicated technican department that works hand and hand with our engineering department that can troubleshoot computer and/or network related issues. Our office is located in Santa Barbara and we assist with both on site and off site computer problems. For more information give us a... read more

Introducing Allworx:A New VoIP Phone System for Small to Medium Sized Business            CIO Solutions is proud to announce that they have recently started carrying a second VoIP (telephone over computer network) phone solution. CIO decided to partner with Allworx because of the value their product provided. Allworx delivers a fully functionin... read more

by Andrew West, CTO Some days at work are definitely more notable than others, and today is one of those exceptional days. We've been providing fully-featured virtualization solutions to our clients for a number of years now, mostly with VMware's ESX (now called vSphere in version 4 of the product line).  Traditionally, these solutions were reserved for organizations with "a lot" of serv... read more

By Gordon Thompson, Remote EngineerThis article discusses the advantages of using an offsite service to host your company's email.  Within the SaaS (Software as a Service) community, email hosting is one of the most popular choices.  This is largely due to the fact of how simple it is to implement and this simplicity is very attractive to small and medium sized business.nbspThe number... read more

By Chase Christian, Engineering Consultant One of the key issues plaguing both PC and Mac users alike is the proliferation of spyware and malware programs on the internet. Spyware, which is designed to capture your information and display advertising/popups, has grown from a rarely seen issue to a daily occurrence for those of us working on the Web. Its malicious brother, malware, is designed ... read more

by Mike Shinn Remote Engineer mshinn@ciosolutions.com     For those of you who read my last article reviewing Windows 7 on why you should consider the switch to Windows 7, I’m still convinced that 7 will stick where Vista had failed.   That said, below are some new features and tips that you can use to get the most out of your Windows 7 experience.   Sha... read more