On March 23 2020, a national lockdown was imposed in the UK to help combat coronavirus. A year later, Jonathan Smy from SMY IT Services, takes a moment to reflect on what has been a very challenging 12 months for us all.

It’s been an unprecedented year – a word that has been used time and time again to describe events, but the only one which really captures how extraordinary the effects of the pandemic have been on the minutiae of our everyday lives.

Here at SMY IT, we have experienced both the highs and the lows of lockdown life like everybody else, but despite the challenges it has made us more resilient as a business.

It has also demonstrated how vital our services are to those who have had to make the transition to remote-working and we have taken a lot of pleasure and satisfaction in ensuring our clients have the necessary IT systems and protocols in place to work from home securely.

Most common questions

Working from home has brought up a variety of questions for the SMY team. These are the most common questions we have been asked by people who have been working from home this year – and some suggested solutions:

1. Ever since I started working from home, my internet speed and reliability has been poor. Is this just because my teenagers are constantly on the Xbox?

Yes and no. With millions of people working and learning from home during the pandemic, internet networks were bound to be strained.

Networks are generally accustomed to certain peaks of activity at specific times of the day, such as in the evening when people return from work and get online at home. But our mass change in behaviour meant we were all competing for connectivity all day long.

The problem is home networks — such as the Wi-Fi routers that residents set up — can be a bit unreliable. Many consumers have broadband plans with much lower capacity than in the workplace. And when many people are loaded onto a single Wi-Fi network at the same time to stream movies or to do video conferencing – or play on the Xbox – that can cause congestion and slowness.

Our suggestions would be to turn off other devices in the home that are connected to the Wi-Fi network and make sure everyone in the house is not online at the same time. You can also look at upgrading your package or changing provider.

2. I keep getting shut out of my accounts and forgetting passwords – what can I do to get back into my computer systems?

Forgotten passwords is a problem for lots of people. After all, losing access to your computer files can be a frightening and frustrating experience. And whether you use your computer for personal or business purposes, a lost password can spell disaster for your projects.

Computer manufacturers and software developers alike, are doing everything they can to bolster security and protect user files from intrusion. This is something that we can all be thankful for – until you need to strong-arm your way into your own computer after having lost your password.

If you have found yourself in such a situation, don’t panic. There are password recovery solutions available which we can help you with.

3. My company IT system is not coping with the home working set up. What can I do to make life easier for my employees and myself?

Working from home has forced lots of companies to look more closely at their system performance and, in some cases, overhaul the lot.

Cloud based systems have proved very effective in the last year at managing lots of people working simultaneously on documents and saving files in one easily accessible place.

The beat way to solve this issue is to have a chat with us about your specific requirements. We need to understand how you work and what is good – and bad – about your current set up to suggest a bespoke solution.

4. My computer is painfully slow. What can I do to speed things up?

This is likely to be a problem with poor hardware. Your operating system will have to manage the resources of your computer (memory, drive space, processing power) between all the programs that are running on it.

There is a huge number of things that may be reducing your computer’s performance, but they usually boil down to your computer’s resources being used inefficiently.

Running out of RAM (Random Access Memory) or disk drive space (HDD or SSD) are common problems as is having an old or fragmented hard drive.
Sometimes it’s as simple as having too many background programs or start-up programmes open or you might be due a Windows or driver update.
On top of this you might have a malware or virus issue.

We have a fix for every problem so if this is happening to you, we need a chat to diagnose the problem first.

Our newest recruit

Working remotely has given the team here at SMY IT, the opportunity to review our own in-house processes and work out how we can best serve our clients.

With that has come the need to expand to meet the rising numbers of remote working teams in the region, seeking support to manage their IT systems and processes.

That is why we were delighted to recently recruit a frontline support engineer, Steve Hawley to help us continue to offer a range of services to those businesses in need.

Adapting to remote working life

When the first lockdown occurred, we provided our clients with access to cybersecurity awareness training that they could then pass onto their employees, to prevent the risk of a cyber-attack.

This has added a layer of security to their protocols which has enhanced their ability to adapt to flexible and agile home working.

This continues to be a growing trend in the business landscape, which means we continue to have lots of work to do to maintain remote systems, as this becomes standard practice for some in a post-coronavirus world.

SMY IT is a high-quality IT support, cloud and consultancy provider and offers a range of services. For more information, visit www.smyservices.com or call 01473 557203.