Blue Ridge Technology

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-...

Lost for words? Draft with Copilot can help Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s business version of those generative AI tools (think ChatGPT and DALL-E and the like) that can seemingly create something out of nothing — or close to it. Now, the next big Copilot feature is here. It’s called Draft with Copilot, and it has the potential to help some users save time and even improve their writing in ways that go beyond what we’ve seen before. Here’s what you need to know about this new feature — what it is, where to access it, and what it can (and can’t) do. Draft with Copilot Is Part of Microsoft Edge (or Is Coming Soon) Let’s start with where to find this new capability: it’s right there in your browser. (Probably.) First, you have to be using Microsoft Edge to benefit from this one. Sorry, Chrome aficionados! Second, it’s a question of timing and permissions. Depending on when you’re reading this and how up to date your browser and OS is, you may already have access to Draft with Copilot. I...

Great news: Microsoft Teams is getting even better! What may already be your favorite office productivity and collaboration tool is getting some new AI-powered features that could really make a difference in your workflows. Here’s what you need to know so you can get the maximum productivity out of this powerful tool you’re already using. Copilot Meeting Transcripts First up is a feature that you may have seen elsewhere, but now it’s built straight into Teams: AI-powered meeting transcripts. Teams users can now use Copilot to automatically transcribe the conversation that’s happening in any Teams meeting. This could be a video chat, an audio call, an all-hands meeting, or just about anything else you can do in Microsoft Teams. Admittedly, this capability has been around for a little while in other tools. There were even workarounds that would let you use other software services to do this in Teams, but what’s great here is tighter integration with Microsoft. In short, you get a better ...

This new search feature in Edge is a revolution If you’ve been in business for a while, chances are you’ve been using the internet for business for a while, too. Whether you consider yourself a true techie or more technologically averse, you learned your tech basics years ago, and that’s a good thing most of the time. But could it be time to unlearn some old habits? I remember learning from my father about a cool new upstart way to search the web: it had a goofy name and a colorful logo and it presented search results in a fun, whimsical way, with pages of results stretching the company name out into something that was unexpected for its time. I’m talking about Google — turns out, that upstart company has managed to do pretty well for itself. Of course, the Google search experience of today is just a little different than it was 20-25 years ago. And there’s all sorts of new competition, including new ways to search and interact with results. Which leads us to our topic this week: if th...

You’re not imagining it, video calls ARE stressful Lots of folks were talking about “Zoom fatigue” in the early days of the pandemic: for reasons no one could quite pinpoint, Zoom meetings just seemed to drain the life and energy out of participants. (By the way, it’s not Zoom’s fault: this kind of fatigue seems endemic to video calling in general, not because of some specific bug on one platform.) Well, we’ve moved on from the pandemic, but the remote and hybrid work has stuck with us. And for many of us, so has an overabundance of video meetings. New Study Confirms Zoom Fatigue Is Real If you do a lot of video calls, then you probably don’t have a hard time agreeing with the premise. We all kind of feel this to be true — but it’s tough to take action without real evidence. Now we have it. Some Austrian minds put together a scientific study to look at what happens to our brains during videoconferencing. Here’s how they did it. They set up two groups of university students, wiring the...

Are you ready for Windows 11 to get even better? Have you ever felt like being a PC user meant certain…compromises? You see ads for seemingly magical features from the likes of Apple or Google — things like pulling text straight out of images, or searching for objects in pictures — and feel left out in the cold? We’ve got good news: Microsoft keeps improving Windows 11, and the company’s latest updates to the operating system are worth catching up on. Admittedly, most of these new features are already available on flagship smartphones. But gaining access to them on work PCs and personal laptops is a pretty big deal. Snipping Tool Gets a Whole Lot Smarter First up is the Snipping Tool. With this tool, which has been a part of the last few generations of Windows, you can easily take a screenshot of your entire screen, or just select a smaller portion of the screen and “snip” it into a static image. Microsoft has implemented some AI-powered and machine learning tech to make those static i...

And breathe… the “file too large to send” problem is over It’s 2023. And yet many of us are still running into 1990s-era email problems. And there’s one incredibly frustrating issue that Microsoft hasn’t helped us all that much across Outlook or Microsoft 365 — yet. We’re talking about that obnoxious error you run into some of the time when you try to send an email with an attachment. It’s the dreaded “file too large to send” message. A Problem That’s Been Around a While It’s a little hard to believe how long this has been an unsolved issue. Sure, email providers have gradually raised the attachment file size limit. But it’s still far too low to account for every use case. Somehow we’re living in an age of streaming everything and cloud dominance — even Microsoft is pushing us all to the cloud with Microsoft 365 and OneDrive. But our email systems still can’t even handle a measly PDF if there are too many pictures in it. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous problem. And thankfully, Microsoft ag...

Is this the ultimate browser for business? Microsoft is out with another new business-friendly tool: Edge for Business . It may not be the most dramatic, awe-inspiring name for a new piece of software, but it’s a pretty significant development — one that could be a big help to your business, in the right circumstances. So what is Microsoft Edge for Business? And what are the reasons a business should — or shouldn’t — switch? What is Microsoft Edge for Business? Microsoft Edge for Business is pretty much what it sounds like: it’s a version of Microsoft’s Edge web browser, but built specifically for business customers rather than at-home consumers. Benefits of Switching to Edge for Business Edge for Business delivers a lot of value in the right circumstances. Here are a few exclusive features or benefits you’ll have access to if you switch. Separation between Work and Personal Browsing One of the big new features is a “wall of separation” between personal and work browsing. With an incre...

Are you losing hours each week setting up video calls? Video calls are the new norm throughout most of the business world. Certainly during the first months of the pandemic they were a life-saver: business couldn’t have happened without them. Now, as we shift to a more long-term remote and hybrid work environment, video calls are here to stay. They unlock all sorts of good for your business: Saves money on unnecessary travel Enables participation when people can’t be in the office (isolation, family care, recovery, etc.) Powers long-distance collaboration that wouldn’t otherwise be feasible Can be recorded and viewed later Allows users to share screen content, ensuring everyone’s on the same page We could go on, but today’s focus is actually on a hidden cost associated with every video call, one that adds up over the year. We’re talking about lost time. The Time Loss Problem Video calls enable so much, but they aren’t free. Every single time an employee gets on the video call, there’s ...

5 quick ways to boost your business’s Wi-Fi speed No matter where you are, Wi-Fi that’s slow or unreliable can completely disrupt the pace of business. This is true whether you’re in your company offices, working from home, or working remotely in some other location. Sometimes there’s nothing much you can do. If you’ve ever tried to jump on Zoom or Teams for a video call over satellite internet while on a trip to the mountains, it probably wasn’t pretty. And while we don’t recommend accessing sensitive company information on them, the public Wi-Fi at McDonald’s or Starbucks or Panera is also subject to speed and reliability issues outside your control. That said, for most of us working from a business location or our homes, there are some tricks worth trying. If you’re dealing with slow Wi-Fi in the office or in your home office, try these 5 quick tips before calling in the pros. 1. Run a Speed Test For starters, you should run a speed test. Some ISPs offer this within their app or por...