This article contains a brief list of nine computer maintenance tips, which will make you a valued employee at your place of work.
If you are able to perform some computer maintenance on your own, you will save both money and time.
This blog post will contain some maintenance tips, which you can perform by yourself, which will help you keep your computer running smoothly.
1 First tip make sure your computer is plugged in, connections connected and your monitor is turned on.
2 Computers often build up dust on the inside. Remove dust from your PC by using compressed air. compressed air removes dust. Perform this operation approximately every 90 days unless you are in a high dust environment. If you are in a polluted environment, then use compressed air every 30 days.
3 The disk defragmenter arranges your files in logical order. It will run automatically in Windows 7 if set up. Arranging your files in logical order will speed up your computer. The disk defrag command will defrag files up to 64MB.
If you want to defrag or arrange larger files, use this command defrag c: -w. This command will defrag all of the files in your hard drive.
4 If you want to check the condition of your hard disk, use the command, Chkdsk. This command will tell you if your disk has any errors or bad tracks.
If you want a command to fix these bad tracks and errors, use the command chkdskg/f. This command will repair your disk in many instances.
If you are using Linux, use fsck.
5 It is a good practice to delete temporary files. Deleting these files will save disk space.
6 Windows disk clean up utility will delete temporary files. Deleting these files will free up disk space, which will also increase the speed of your computer.
7 In windows you have a backup and restore command where you can restore your computer to a time when it functioned without errors.
8 It is a good practice to back up to an external hard drive. Hard drives are constantly getting cheaper. Use them, they will save you time and money.
9 When backing up files, use archive attributes, this will make it easier to find these files if you need them. You simply need to select file types to be backed up and the location where you want them to be stored.
#ABCO #Technology teaches comprehensive programs for network administration and #CyberSecurity . Possessing the knowledge to fix, maintain, install and protect networks is vital in the economy of the twenty-first century. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. Call today at: (310) 216-3067
Email all questions to info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who can qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Get started by learning computers and networks today!
Block chain technology is talked about everywhere in the media from local news broadcasts to bfinancial network speculation relating to the future price of bitcoin. If you ask most people about this technology, they can’t define block chain in one sentence.
Block Chain is simply nothing more than shared data stored on multiple computers, which uses encryption. When we talk about encryption, we are discussing scrambeling and descrambling data for the purposes of achieving privacy.
The basic use of encryption dates back to the mid 1980s when the first encryption standards were formed.
Encryption evolved with shared key or symmetric encryption where both parties used the same key to descramble the data. Semetric encryption was fast, easy to use, but it was cracked by hackers. Next came asymmetric key encryption where each party had a different key. This was known as a set of public and private keys. Asemetric encryption was slower than its brother semetric, but it was more difficult for hackers. The public key was assigned to the sender and the private key went to the receiver.
From asymmetric came the use of a third party or introducing a third key and party into the mix.
The third key developed into the multiple computer block chain where data is shared on a large number of computers or a concept of shared trust. In addition to simply sharing data, the algorithms or operations had to be complicated to make them difficult to attack.
Naturally bitcoin became an outgrowth of this technology. The price of bitcoin has made wild swings ranging between 20 to 60% in one week.
However, bitcoin is only one of 1376 different crypto currencies.
The jobs and money in this field will come from other uses of the technology. For example Kodak is using block chain to license images for photographers. IBM is developing uses for block chain to keep track of medical records. Oracle is developing a block chain solution for databases, which must be kept very secure. Microsoft along with other fortune 500 companies are researching uses of block chain technology.
The new uses of block chain will require anyone who works in the networking field to have a solid understanding of encryption, how encryption standards operate and the fastest solutions for descrambling the data. Bitcoin for example takes almost seven minutes to complete a financial transaction. A person making the same transaction using regular currency can complete a financial exchange in milliseconds.
Although encryption is getting a lot of attention, it’s still slow when the data needs to be converted back into a readable form. Research will continue and better solutions will be developed. It is the job of the cyber security professional to determine the best ways to use block chain.
#ABCO #Technology teaches a comprehensive class for cyber security. Call our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday. You can reach us at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
There is an old saying, which dominates the marketing and search engine industries. This saying states “content is king.”
Content comes from information. If content is king, then information is power.
The question of how to use this information begins with its storage and access. Information is stored in columns, rows and tables, which makes up what information technology experts call a relational database. The term relational means one piece of information relates to another. This information must be easily accessible, have the flexibility to be manipulated into a report and the presentation should be in such a way that other relationships can be drawn from that information.
One occupation, which has the job of making all of this activity take place is that of an Oracle database administrator. Oracle, handles the nation’s largest databases including those from the US government, major educational institutions and Fortune 1,000 companies. Google uses a customized version of Oracle for its search engine.
#Oracle #Database administrators are responsible for the accessibility, security and safety for a company’s information.
This includes client records, financial data, product information and all other documents needed for an organization’s successful operation. Oracle database administrators do not have to possess a four-year college degree. The person entering into this occupation must be well organized, enjoy categorizing information and have a passion for making that information accessible to those persons who need to use it. Security is also a major concern. The database administrator will become proficient with Oracle’s database security protocols and procedures.
The Oracle database administrator is accomplished when students train and pass two Oracle certification exams. The first exam a student must successfully complete is that of Oracle Certified Associate. The #OCA is usually completed after eight weeks of training in an accredited Oracle class.
The final exam, which is the Oracle Certified Professional, which carries the title of database administrator is usually passed after three additional months of training.
Oracle database administrators are experiencing a wide variety of job openings throughout the country. The job sites of Indeed and Glass door show the average salary for Oracle database administrators at approximately $93,000 per year. As you gain experience in this occupation, your salary will increase. Oracle has specialized databases, which include Oracle financials, Oracle medical and Oracle biological. Students can specialize in one of these databases after passing the Oracle certified Professional exam. Naturally specializing in a specific field will mean an increase in salary.
If you are interested in training for this exciting career, contact #ABCO #Technology. You can reach our campus between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all qualified students.
#ABCO #Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE #588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Database administrators are in demand, train and certify for a job today!
The State of Mobile User Experience By Charles Pascal
Summary: Ten years from the original iPhone, the field of mobile UX has finally reached maturity.
The original iPhone was released in June 2007. In late 2009, when ABCO Technology wrote the research for the first article of our mobile report, most people still had primitive mobile devices with horrible user experience. At the time, anything that was half-way decent was a pleasant experience compared with the misery caused by most mobile devices and most mobile sites.
Three years ago, when the second article of the mobile report came out, we did a thorough evaluation of the state of mobile usability. At the time, we were happy to report that mobile usability was no longer an oxymoron— and we finally saw many sites and apps with decent usability. With the new third 2018 article of our mobile-UX research report, we continue to see progress.
Today, most mobile sites and applications offer a good user experience. There are still the occasional glitches and sacrifices of usability in favor of aesthetics, but we can confidently say that the field has progressed in the past two years since the last article. Most of the egregious errors are not there anymore. When we tried to update the examples for many of our mobile guidelines, we discovered that the companies had fixed their problems and some of the issues that we discussed were no longer common. Yet we also encountered revivals of problems we thought almost extinct two years ago. In the business of usability, mistakes (like trends) tend to be cyclic: one generation identifies them and creates design patterns that avoid them, but later generations, no longer having witnessed the UX problem, make the same error again in their quest for refreshed designs. It’s always two steps forward and one step backward.
Content vs. Chrome
The importance of prioritizing content over UI elements (that is, chrome) was one of the lessons learned from responsive design. The hamburger-menutrend was a consequence of that lesson: designers were trying to minimize the number of UI elements visible on the screen because these took away precious content space. Two years later, designers continue to value the screen real estate on mobile devices — but they’ve reached measure in hiding the chrome. A break has been put on the hamburger trend. It’s still very widespread (as we argue elsewhere, hidden navigation is the only option for some sites), but many have understood that it should not be used if a better pattern (such as a visible navigation bar) is available.
Prioritizing content over chrome has trickled in other design areas: for instance, we no longer see results pages headed by fat filters that occupy half the page. Or, the nested-doll pattern, which involved having users make a sequence of selections through multiple pages before encountering content, is no longer as popular as it used to be. At least some companies have started to understand that it’s better to flatten the navigation structure on mobile: show people a variety of content right away and allow them to later narrow it down to a specific category of interest.
Walgreens.com used the nested-doll navigation pattern, which used to be popular in the past but is becoming less widespread. It required users to make 4 category selections before they could see any products. However, Walgreens tried to create the illusion of content by adding product images to the some of the category-selection pages, which suggests that designers were likely aware of the tedium of this category-based design.
#Google Express for iPhone: Instead of listing all the subcategories under Grocery, a few items were displayed under each. Instead of using a category-based design where users had to decide among different categories, the app rightly used a content-based design.
Use of Gestures
Gestures solve the problem of too much chrome on a too small screen, but they are notoriously hard to discover and learn. Some of the original gesture enthusiasm (embodied by gesture-only apps such as Clear Todos) has dampened down, but gesture use is still one of the more promising directions in mobile design.
Clear Todos for iPhone, whose first version appeared around 2012, used a variety of gestures to compensate for the lack of visual interface elements. These gestures were hard to remember.
Unfortunately, gestures are a chicken-and-egg problem: they won’t become easy to learn and use until a standard vocabulary of gestures used across apps and websites is built, and all applications and websites use these gestures consistently. But, on the other hand, designers are forced to stay away from gestures because they have so little familiarity among their user base.
Apple has had multiple attempts to expand the standard vocabulary of gestures (with the introduction of 3D Touch for iPhone 6S) and to delegate some of the visible chrome to gestures. Their attempts have culminated with the iPhone X — which got rid of the iPhone’s only physical button to replace it with a series of swipe gestures. The result has been a more effective use of the screen at the expense of some initial learning hurdles for people used with the old Home button.
#3D Touch was a promising direction, but it is still relatively rarely used by applications. However, two other (old) gestures are increasing in popularity to the point of being added to that basic gesture vocabulary: the swipe-to-delete for exposing some contextual actions including delete, and the two-finger scroll for moving around a map embedded on a webpage. While the swipe-to-delete simply adds a convenient way to perform contextual actions on a list element, the two-finger scroll solves the problem of swipe ambiguity, often encountered when maps are embedded in web pages. These gestures are becoming more and more familiar to users, although we still recommend that designs which use them add other redundant ways to perform the same actions or at least have good contextual tips to guide users.
The two-finger scroll gesture is becoming a standard for map scrolling and solves the problem of swipe ambiguity (where users attempt to scroll the page and accidentally scroll the map or viceversa).
Better Integration Between the Mobile Web and the App Web
Transitioning from the web to an app used to require a specific user action: on iOS, people had to explicitly choose to open an app and then perform a search inside it. From iOS 9 on, it’s become possible to easily transition between the mobile web and the app web— if I search for a movie in a search engine, some of the search results will seamlessly open corresponding application pages (when users have these applications installed).
When a link to a movie on the search-results page was selected, the control moved from Safari to the iMDb app. The Back-to-appbutton was displayed in the top left corner of the status bar and was labeled with the name of the previously used app (Safari).
This seamless transition from browser to app, or, more generally, from one app to the next ensures that the experience of consuming content is optimal — because, most often, applications will have a better user experience than sites(simply because they are closer to the mobile platform for which they were designed).
Unfortunately, with this design we also see a new burden placed on users: that of keeping track of where they are and knowing how to navigate back. Applications still have to accommodate that need — for example, we still notice that many apps (like iMDb above) do not include logos on their deep pages, which makes it more difficult for users to orient themselves in this new expanded app-plus-web universe.
A notable improvement, possibly related to the increased ease of switching from browser to app, has been a lower number of interstitial app ads. (Almost) gone are the days when navigating to a new site was preceded by an interstitial inviting the user to download the app. Most of the time, the app is simply advertised in a banner at the top of a web page.
Better Use of Phone Features
Although not perfect, more and more sites and apps take advantage of basic phone functionality. Checking out on many ecommerce sites has become a breeze due to integrated systems like Apple Pay and Android Pay. And most sites and apps take into account the user’s current location. Biometric authentication promises to get us closer from the problem of remembering passwords, and can even make desktop login easier by allowing users to easily transfer information (and thus automatically log in) across devices.
When setting up a new iPhone, there was no need to type in credentials to authenticate: they were automatically transferred from a nearby device.
Fewer Tutorials: Stagnation
A few years ago, any respectable app started with a lengthy tutorial that catalogued all the different features available in the app. These tutorials were at worst annoying and at best ineffective — no user could remember the plethora of commands listed in a lengthy tutorial. Nor were they motivated to remember any of them — after all, who could say in advance what features would be actually useful?
Today, those tutorials have been largely replaced with general overviews of the apps, meant to convince the user to go beyond the login walland create an account. Ideally, these login walls should disappear completely and users should be able to experience the app without having to register at all. The initial app overviews play the function of an ad — and most people hate to have to sit through an ad, especially if they’ve already spent the effort to download the app.
Steps Backward
Although overall the responsive-design trend has been a positive influence, the quest for building across multiple interaction modalities has pushed some towards strange solutions like using a split-button for menus or accordions. The intent behind the split-buttonmenu is to replicate desktop’s hover-plus-click interaction for categories in the main navigation — that is, to allow access both to a category landing page and to a submenu. Yet it is a highly unusable solution — not only because it crams two targets in a small space and makes the job of acquiring each of them more difficult for human fingers, but also because it violates users’ expectations and the mobile patterns that they have learned so far.
Another somewhat surprising development has been the disappearance of guest checkout. Sites and apps that used to offer this functionality in the past have eliminated it — some rely on Check out with Apple Payor Check out with PayPalto compensate for the lack of guest checkout. But many still force users to create an account although they may be one-time purchasers. On the plus side, registration has been simplified in many designs — it is fairly common nowadays to be asked only for an email and a password in order to create an account.
The popularity of the overlay has increased, with many sites implementing menus as overlays. Two years ago, many mobile overlays were buggy and created funny effects (such as content behind the overlay suddenly appearing on top of it). Today’s overlays are much better. But they often look like full pages, and people treat them as such — expecting to be able to use the Backbutton to close them and navigate back to the previous view. Often, they get disoriented when that does not happen and instead they are spit out of the site. When an entire flow is moved in overlays (as it is the case with the increasingly popular sequential menus), the opportunity for errors increases even more, with people forgetting to use the menu’s Back button to ensure correct navigation in the overlay and instead using the browser or the phone’s Backbutton.
LATimes.com: The menu was displayed in an overlay that looked like a new page (left). In spite of the Closebutton in the top left corner, people will still be tempted to tap the browser’s Backbutton to close the overlay. If they did so, they would be taken to the previously visited page (the search-engine page — right) instead of to the LA Times homepage.
Conclusion
Ten years from the first iPhone, the field of mobile user experience has finally reached a reasonable level of maturity. It was about time — according to a recent report by comScore, in many parts of the world, more than half of the online time is spent on mobile. So it’s only right that mobile usability catches up with desktop usability. It doesn’t mean that mobile sites and apps have reached a state of usability perfection: there’s no such thing as a perfect design. It simply means that a lot of them offer a decent user experience, and that many flagrant errors of the past have been fixed.
ABCO Technology teaches a comprehensive course for E-commerce. Call our technical college campus today. You can reach us between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday at: (310) 216-3067.
Email your questions to: info@abcotechnology.edu
Financial aid is available to all students who qualify for funding.
ABCO Technology is located at: 11222 South La Cienega Blvd. STE # 588 Los Angeles, Ca. 90304
Some of the best careers to pursue when you leave high school are in the information technology field
Congratulations, you’ve recently graduated high school–that’s a great achievement! You’ve completed twelve years of education and now the time has come to search for a full-time job. So you begin your search good-paying careers out of high school.
Are you finding that job search to be more difficult than you believed?
Would you like a better job than working at a fast food restaurant?
Have you been told by many employers that they would like to hire you, if you only had those important skills?
Have employers informed you that you have no work experience?
Would you like a real solution to this problem that will not take a lot of time?
Would you want that solution to have career advancement, provide future opportunities for education and give you excellent raises?
An outstanding solution to your problem is to enroll in a vocational school that teaches information technology skills.
Train for a Information Technology Career
Information technology is leading the job hiring fields today, because the education is performance based, and that is what employers are looking for in all new hires. Information technology training is based upon training, performance and certification. Employers are looking for employees they do not have to train, who can perform the job on the first day of employment. Would you like to be that special candidate?
This vocational training does not require a college degree, but it can put you on the road to getting one. Many students who get a job in this field wind up working for a company that will pay all or part of their college tuition after being an employee for more than one year. Countless new workers are taking advantage of this great opportunity. If you have heard that going to a vocational school will stop you from ever attending college, this is truly a myth. In fact, many students use vocational training to finance future debt-free college degrees. Many employers, especially colleges and universities, offer tuition-free classes to all university employees. This is one way to graduate from college owing no money. A great example of one university offering free tuition to college employees is Loyola Marymount University, which is about one mile from our ABCO Technology campus.
What certifications will get that great job?
If you are a person who enjoys repairing and solving problems with a computer, the CompTIA A+ certification is just for you. You can complete the A+ in six weeks, and after completing this training you can look for that better paying job as a computer repair specialist or in desktop support.
Students certifying in web development build websites, which all businesses need to advertise their services. The database field has the job title of database administrator, which involves handling large amounts of information. In fact there is an explosion of new jobs in the database field because of recent changes in health care. Computer programmers write games, design smart phone applications and write programs for Windows and other operating systems. New jobs for computer programmers are now available in the U.S., especially since programming for smart phone applications requires an in-depth knowledge of local culture.
Some of the certifications listed in this article will take six months to complete.
Real Careers Out Of High School Are Out There!
Vocational training is popular because it is hands-on education. This means when you graduate, you can do the job a future employer wants. Employers substitute your performance for countless years of experience when you fill out that important job application listing your newly acquired job skills.
ABCO Technology is an ACCSC accredited institution. That accreditation means that students may apply for financial aid and receive help with their education if they qualify.
Students enrolling at ABCO Technology receive a diploma instead of a certificate. The diploma is highly valued when placed next to that important certification.
If you would like to receive more information about how a vocational education will jump-start your job career, contact ABCO Technology.
You can reach our campus by phone at: (310) 216-3067 Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 6 PM.
