Orbits will be closed on Monday 27th May for the bank holiday, you will still be able to contact us via helpdesk@orbitsit.co.uk and we will respond as soon as we can.
Opening hours will be back to normal on the Tuesday 28th May.
Hope you all enjoy the bank holiday.
On behalf of all at Orbits,
Jim, Pete, Toby & Dean
One of my tasks set by my directors last week was to replace a hard drive in a computer, I’d already replaced hard drives in PCs and Laptops previously so thought nothing of it. Jim then told me it was an iMac and that the hard drive was located behind the screen.
Over the past year I have had to replace hard drives in computers/servers and laptops but never an iMac. I’d heard that replacing a hard drive in an iMac was quite difficult due to the reason that an iMac doesn’t have a tower, the hard drive is located behind the screen.
During my last review one of my goals for the next period was to perform a solo on site visit for a client. I was tasked with going to a client site in Cardiff to help their director, Toni, out with Asset Tagging and to install a new monitor for herself. Continue reading
Orbits will be open for business at the following time:
Monday 24th December: 9am to 5pm
Tuesday 25th December: Closed
Wednesday 26th December: Closed
Thursday 27th December: 9am to 5pm
Friday 28th December: 9am to 5pm
Monday 31st December: 9am to 5pm
Tuesday 1st January: Closed
Wednesday 2nd January: Back to Normal.
On behalf of all at Orbits, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Jim, Pete, Toby & Dean
I have been volunteering at Orbits IT for the last couple of months to gain some experience in the IT industry. I have recently completed a HNC in computing from the University of Glamorgan, hoping now to find a career in IT.
I feel as though I have learnt a lot from the Orbits team and have been lucky enough to be asked to join the team as a Orbits team member.
I have covered many topics in the last ten weeks from creating spreadsheets to rebuilding PCs and installing hardware off site.
I look forward to the future at working at Orbits and learning a lot more from the rest of the team.
Several weeks ago Orbits were approached by an organisation called C.A.R.I.A.D (Care and Respect Includes All Dogs – and Cariad is Welsh for Love). They are dedicated to highlighting the issue of Puppy farming in Wales and were planning a 7 Day live event to coincide with National Puppy Awareness Week. Their plan was to create a ‘big brother’ style live streaming event where the world can watch one brave lady be subjected to the same sort of conditions a puppy may suffer at some disreputable puppy farms for 7 days. It was Orbits role to find a suitable method of providing a live 24/7 stream which can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world. If you have a large budget then this kind of event is easy enough to put together. The trouble is, C.A.R.I.A.D are only a small organisation and whilst there was a budget it would not go far.
Without the money to fund the bandwidth required to stream directly to their website and then on to the viewers, Orbits looked at several options and one of the most promising was using a 3rd party solution called Veetle. You can think of Veetle as a YouTube for live video. After several days of testing both video quality, bandwidth requirements and viewer restrictions it was decided the Veetle was going to do what we need at a cost that was in budget.
And so it was that last week Orbits shipped a laptop and webcam to the top secret location of the event and began onsite testing. The live event began at midday on Saturday 12th of September and the stream has been broadcasting uninterrupted for over 4 days and has been viewed by nearly 7000 viewers and has drawn attention all over the world.
Orbits are managing the stream until midday on Saturday 22nd September at which time the brave subject will return to the normal world having successfully highlighted the issue in an interesting, educational and certainly unique way.
You can view the current stream here: C.A.R.I.A.D Live 7 Days Event
[UPDATE: The event is now finished and the live stream is no longer available.]
Here at Orbits, we are always striving to improve our service to our clients and part of this involves getting feedback from existing clients. The Orbits Client Satisfaction Survey went out to over 25 of our Unlimited Support clients earlier this week and whilst we are still receiving responses back, we have had lots of replies and so far we are delighted with the results. Some of the highlights of the survey are:
Question: In general, how satisfied are you with Orbits IT as your support provider?
Results so far: 100% of respondents are Very Satisfied.
*Note* We received one response of Very Unsatisfied from possibly our biggest clients. The rest of the responses seemed to suggest this was a mistake and when we queried it we received the following reply – “Sorry, No, never I meant Very Satisfied!!!!”…..Phew!
Question: Please rate the following areas of Orbits’ Service.
1: Value for Money: 75% of respondents chose Excellent, 25% chose Good.
2: Customer Service: 100% of respondents chose Excellent.
3: Response Times: 100% of respondent chose Excellent.
4: Technical Knowledge: 100% of respondents chose Excellent
Question: Would you recommend Orbits’ services to other organisations such as your own?
Results so far: 100% of respondents would Certainly recommend us.
We also got valuable feedback on which additional services Orbits should offer it’s clients and we will be looking to roll out IT Training, PAT Testing, VOIP Telephony and Broadband over the coming month. Keep en eye out for those.
Whilst we have received excellent feedback on our service levels, we refuse to get complacent and will be looking to improve all aspect of our service this year.
If you would like to see evidence of these Survey Results, please Contact Us and we would be happy to provide them.
Finally, a big thankyou to all of our clients who took part in the survey, it is really appreciated by the team.
We’re as excited as anyone about the possibilities of cloud services for small businesses, but it can sometime be difficult to compare the value between in-house and hosted systems. We crunched some numbers to try and help you understand the differences between running Windows Small Business Server with Exchange vs. Orbits’ Hosted Exchange.
The more users you have the more the balance tips towards running your own server, but when you have less than 20 mailboxes it works out cheaper, without even taking into account any of the non-financial advantages of moving to the cloud.
One of the reasons people find it hard to evaluate whether cloud services are a good option for them is that the pricing model is different. The pricing for Orbits’ Hosted Exchange is simple – £5 per mailbox per month. The price you pay for running your own system includes large upfront costs for server hardware and software, installation and support, but the incremental cost of adding another mailbox is negligible.
So to compare the two options we need to make some assumptions:
The short answer is £2,940! The calculation goes as follows: Continue reading
I have been working for the Orbits team for eighteen days now, however, it is with great sadness that I must finally relieve the Jed train of its duties.
Well, all train terminology aside, it has to be said. No matter how much I would like to continue working here, I must finally take my leave, as I need to go back to the Sixth Form to continue with my studies. But, enough of that. This is making my blog post sound very depressing, which is different to how I want it to sound.
While it is sad that I must leave the Orbits team, I can go out of the door, confidently saying that I have achieved something here. Working here at Orbits has given me a tremendous amount of insight into the working world, and has also given me a lot of experience, as well.
I have learnt many different skills here such as how to setup and speed up computers, back up files with software such as ‘Paragon’, setup e-mail accounts for myself and other users, as well as many other skills.
So, basically, I would like to thank Jim and Pete for giving me the opportunity to work here. The fact that they gave up some of their time to teach me all these different skills, and help me with any problems I had means a tremendous lot to me, and I cannot begin to thank them enough for this experience. I would also like to think that both I and they got something out of this.
As I require additional work experience next year, it would be great if I could come back to Orbits for some more work experience. That is, if Jim and Pete are okay with it, of course. xD
Well, anyway, I would like to thank the Orbits team again for giving me this opportunity, and I will be sure to keep in touch.
Hopefully, I will be back here again to do more work experience at some point.
Thank you!
This is your’s truly, signing off!
As a side note, if you have not already done so, please be sure to follow the Orbits team on Facebook and Twitter!
Moving on to the topic at hand, recently, we decided to run our own Minecraft server here at Orbits so that we could test some hardware. Now, before I go any further, for those of you who do not know, Minecraft is a PC game created by Mojang, and is notorious for being a CPU-hungry beast. So, it should be of no surprise that we used this game as a medium for conducting our server hardware tests.
So, without further ado, let us move on to discuss the environment which we used to run a Minecraft server in and, in addition, discuss the results of our tests.
Stress testing, TNT style.
As you could probably figure out by the above image, we used all sorts of fun necessary tests that helped us ascertain what the server could handle, and what it could not handle. High quantities of TNT were one of the things that it could not handle. Still, that was to be expected.
Breaking News: Lava engulfs Minecraftia!
Another test that we conducted was a lava stress test. Minecraft’s physics are certainly very CPU-intensive, so I decided to use lava as a means of stress testing, as well as TNT. I used a server plugin known as ‘WorldEdit’ to generate thousands of lava blocks at the same time. As you can probably imagine, this would place a heavy load upon any server. Fortunately, our’s passed this test, generating all of the lava blocks without too much lag.
Now, with regards to what environment we used to run the server, we used a virtual machine which was allocated a limited amount of RAM (approximately, one to two gigabytes), and using an Intel ‘Xeon’ processor, running at 3.10GHz per second.
So, the verdict? Well, considering that this server was running inside a virtual machine with a limited amount of allocated memory, I would say that the server performed rather well. Of course, this type of environment would not be suitable for everday use, and would only be able to manage a few players, at most. Still, this server proved to be a worthy test subject, surpassing my expectations with regards to its performance.
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