5,000th Support Ticket Closed!

We are so proud to announce a milestone for our company.

Since 2009, we have been “Making Technology Useful” for our clients, one support ticket at a time.

Today, October 17th, 2012 at 4:04 pm, we closed our 5,000th support ticket.

To celebrate, we made this video.  Enjoy.

Elad will keep our Promise of Excellence to Make Technology Useful for our clients.

Welcome to our newest Tech, Ryan Ludwick.

We wanted to welcome Ryan as a part-time junior tech.

A graduate of  John Hardin High School.  Ryan Ludwick is currently pursuing an IT Program at ECTC.   He started on Windows 98.  He built his first computer when he was 16.  Unlike most geeks, Ryan really enjoys the outdoors, especially hiking, hunting, fishing, and biking.

We are excited to have Ryan as our newest member of the Elad family.

Find out more about Ryan at: about.me/ryanludwick
 

Expanding our minds….

2012 is here!!! We all get excited about a new year its a fresh start for individuals and businesses, we are all able to look back on the past year and put a new plan into place. Well, we have our plan and we are ready to get it going, but we need your help!

One goal of ours is to provide user friendly information once a week for readers. This information will help you as the user to learn more about technology and hopefully walk away with some helpful tips. Our goal at Elad is to “Make technology better” and what better way than to inform users.

Here is your job….if you are interested in receiving helpful tips,news, and reviews from Elad we need your email address. All you need to do is reply yes or no to WorkIT and if you want to submit a friends email or a different address send that also.

Click here  to start expanding your mind with 2012′s first article!

For more information or questions please Contact Us and we will assist you!

Welcome Wagon

We are excited to welcome a new member to the Elad Team! Dave Dawson has joined us and will be working with our GSA and Government Contracts. We are very excited to have Dave and all his knowledge working with us. Government sales is something Elad has never done before, so we have high hopes for this department. Dave has so many talents and skills, if you don’t believe me just read below!

He has a doctorate in management, specializing in Information Systems Technology. He is currently waiting on the University of Phoenix Academic Review Board approval of my dissertation – the last hurdle before he can officially use his title – Dr.

Other education includes an MBA from the University of Phoenix (attended the resident course in Louisville) and my undergraduate BS in Computer Information Systems from McKendree University. He is an Adjunct Professor for Sullivan University and teach Business Organization and Management, Business Law, and Math. He is married to Barbra and lives in Elizabethtown and together they have 9 children, and 7 grand children. The oldest son, David III is an Apache Attack Helicopter pilot for the US Army, a son who is in his junior year at the University of Louisville, a daughter who is a senior at Western Kentucky, a daughter who is a sophomore at Bellermine University, a daughter who is in the nursing program at ECTC, and a daughter who is a senior at North Hardin High School. They also have a son who is a Freshman at Central Hardin and a son who is in the 8th grade at West Hardin Middle School. Barbra owns and operates Fergus Mor, a deli/pizzeria in the Food Court of the Towne Mall.

He has been a leader in government contracting business since he retired from the Army in 2001 and have won several prominent contract awards for companies doing business with the US Army at Fort Knox. He is a GSA contract expert in acquiring, managing, marketing, and training. He has done all aspects of GSA and government sales including acquisition, marketing, and compliance. And also a technology geek with the heart of a serial entrepreneur. Always searching for innovation.

So once again we are excited to build this relationship and have you on the team!

HP Slate 500

After only two days of having my HP Slate 500 in my hand I will go on record and say this is the beginning of a beautiful thing.  I have a close relationship with my IPad1, then my IPad2, and up to this point anticipated the release of IPad3, but in the two days I’ve had my Slate, my iPad has only been used by the kids to play games.  Being in the business world I rely on most business things; Email, 4-5 websites, and general usage.  The Slate has given me this plus keeping it in a Windows7 environment we are all used to.

In my opinion there are a few tweaks that need to happen before it will become the iPad killer but the concept of having a full Windows7 Professional experience on something the size of my iPad will change things.  I can see the day that we laughed at having keyboards attached to our monitors and called them laptops.  I can see our children laughing at us because we used to have a pointing device in our hand to drag around the screen, I can even see the day where needing to 10 finger type is a crazy thought.  The screen is a bit smaller and not as brilliant as the iPad, but it will do EVERYTHING my pc will do not just what Apple says I can do.  The lack of a built in air card is a drag, but it is first generation so I’ll deal with the USB adapter for now.  Yes I said USB adapter, plus it has a SD slot so I can add up to 32gb extra storage on top of the 64gb internal. I would add a 64gb SD card, but who can afford those, but that is ok for me since everything is in the cloud anyway.  Final though, yes it’s first generation, but I would still purchase one before I bought a laptop.  It is PERFECT for college students who’s life is about social interaction with a dash of a professional PC experience for papers and research.

Wait,  I forgot about the camera’s, it has front and rear facing for all you face timers.  There are many more things I forgot, needless to say, this changes everything and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Disagree, want to leave a comment, go for it, I like push back.

Oh one more thing, instead of raising the debt ceiling the government should stop all it’s testing and development on the iPad and just use the HP slate, you’ve already done all the testing to make a Windows experience secure, save my tax dollars and just use what works, that will cause some conversation.

Tell us what you think! Post a comment below.

The cost of a slow pc

This is intended for business owners, but if you’re suffering from slowpcititus feel free to quote any part of this to your boss to show how much a slow pc is costing the company. Over the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of improvements in computer hardware and software that is making the pc experience a “breeze”.  The first thing we do as Elad with new clients is install tools on clients pc’s that will enhance the performance to take advantage of existing hardware and monitor errors so they can be taken care of before there are major disastors.  A personal friend of mine works for a .com in Los Angeles California.  He was so impressed by his boss when he walked in the door and told him, “you must use a Dell Precision desktop, besides that you decide what goes in it.”  This boss knew the importance of productivity vs. cost of downtime.  So, to help out those that don’t believe in upgrading or updating pcs, I decided I would sit down and actually calculate what a slow computer costs a company.

If we take an average of $12/hour for a full time employee.  Let’s assume this upper level employee gets two weeks vacation so they actually use their computer 50 weeks a year.  Let’s also assume they take all the national holidays off, because most upper level employees do.  So, now let’s assume they have at least decent hardware in their computer so it runs 60-80% optimal of what modern hardware would run.  Now, let’s reboot that pc one time a day for lock-ups or slowness/maintenance.  A normal reboot of a pc takes 5-10 minutes.  You know as well as I do that idle minds lead to idle hands so we’d better add another 10 minutes in for distractions of talking to neighbors, taking a trip to the snack machine (after all their pc is rebooting), or going to bathroom while their pc frustrates them.

According to Answers.com there are 250 working days in 2011.  Take away 10 days for vacation and we’ll use the working number of 240 productivity days in 2011.  Out of those 240 productivity days let’s assume an upper level employee works 8 hours.  That leads us to believe there are 1,920 productivity hours available to an employee.  Being paid $12/hour that would put this employee paid $23,040 for their productivity.

Now, let me make my point.  If that employee loses 20 minutes a day in productivity to a slow computer they would be losing 4,800 minutes (20 minutes * 240 days) over the course of a year.  This calculates to 80 hours (4,800/60 minutes) over the course of a year.  Now for the final tally, if a company lost 2 weeks of productivity to pc related problems that is going to cost the company …  $960 per year.  The “recommended” lifetime of a computer is 3-5 years, therefor $2880 – $4800.

For the .com company in California, they understood the other side of this.  If computers could stay at 100% effeciency this would not only save them a ton in lost productivity each year but increase the productivity of their employees, therefor being more profitable.

When does a pc start costing you too much?  We offer a Dell PC’s loaded with Windows7 and Microsoft Office 2010 starter with a one year warranty for $699, it looks like replacing the pc every year would still save a company almost $300/year.

Email sales@elad.cc to get your on order today.

In case your wondering about that friend in California.  He bought a $4300 quad monitor, 32gb RAM, and dual quad core 2.6 ghz Precision desktop.  Too much you think?  Not when you calculate he makes $55/hour, so his lost productivity costs would be $4400/year.

The question no one asks

Account Manager Summer Blain holds up her piping hot, newly acquired Microsoft Online Services Certification.

If you could ask me one question that would get my gears rolling it would be this, “What makes Elad different than others?”  Here’s the short answer, because we’re better.  Short reply would be, “Why?”.  Long answer would go something like this.  Technology is always changing, there’s always a new way to do things, always a new gadget, always a new software.  How are we different?  We dedicate ourselves to keeping up with technology and applying it to different situations.  Immediately when Google Apps allowed service providers to be resellers Elad jumped on board.  Because of Google’s dedication to technology and pushing the limits of what your mind seems feasable in communication and collaboration, this is what we want to be a part of.  We are one of 4 Google apps resellers in the state (chest puffed out).  Now when Microsoft is pushing it’s “cloud” services through service providers we jumped on it to learn the technology so that we can start applying it to our businesses.  What makes Elad different?  We aren’t the people working in their garage or trying to help our clients out on the side.  We keep up with Technology, our clients can rely on the fact that they are getting the best advice and the latest solutions.  So are we better that what your using?

Here’s a picture of Summer getting her certification on Microsoft Online Services.  We require all employees to get a certification per quarter, this is part of what makes us better.  Go ahead, ask me how many certifications we have.

Thanks!

Hey, big thank you to everyone who came out to this year’s open house in Elad’s new office space!

As a new partner to the Elad team I was awed and humbled by the Read more >>

We’re Pretty Excited!

Tomorrow/Today (given the time of this post) we’ll be hosting an Open House in our new digs on North Dixie. Pretty proud of the new space, it’s about thrice the size of our Mulberry office, it’s newer and Read more >>