Blue Ridge Technology

In late September 2024, life changed for many of us in Western North Carolina. Our team was fortunate to make it through the storm safely, with relatively little damage or disruption (at least compared to many in communities near us). We usually use this blog to share tech tips and IT advice, but this blog post is going to be a little different. First, we want to let clients and readers know that we’re open for business . We’re already supporting our clients around the region, helping them resume normal operations and recover any data or infrastructure that was lost to Helene. Second, we want to pause and think of the hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations impacted by the storm. Communities around us have been devastated. None of us have ever seen anything like this, and who would have thought that our mountain communities needed to prepare for a hurricane? Full recovery will be months, maybe years, in the making. Observations on Serving as an MSP Post-Helene Our organi...

You’re ready for the upgrade… what’s holding you back? Is your business still running on Windows 10? If so, it’s time to start making plans to switch. Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025. That means the end of security updates, the end of customer service, and the end of fixes to broken functionality. In other words: Windows 10 will gradually get less stable, more vulnerable, and harder to troubleshoot. Why Some Businesses Delayed Making the Switch When Microsoft released Windows 11, they included some relatively stringent hardware requirements. These were intended to increase overall security of Windows 11, which they did. But the reality was that at the time some older hardware wasn’t capable of upgrading. Businesses that still relied on that kind of hardware didn’t have a choice: they simply couldn’t upgrade. Other businesses were worried about legacy applications, including some applications where the software maker no longer exists. There was no hope of upda...

That dreaded Blue Screen of Death. Ah, the Blue Screen of Death: It’s been a staple of Microsoft Windows going back decades — way back to 1993’s Windows NT 3.1. Usually a last-ditch response, the BSOD indicates that your Windows PC has crashed — and nothing’s coming back until you restart. What’s so frustrating about the dreaded blue screen is that it seemingly comes out of nowhere. No warning, and no recourse whatsoever. Once it hits, your computer’s unresponsive until you restart, and whatever you were working on might be lost for good. The Real Cost of the Blue Screen of Death Sure, BSODs are annoying, but the real cost is more than your sanity (and that of your employees or team members). Whenever a PC goes down, your work stops — maybe just for a minute or two, maybe for five. But we all know that a five-minute interruption is more than a five-minute impact. Your entire train of thought gets derailed, and any state of flow or high performance is disrupted. Plus there’s the not-so-...