Dell’s Precision T1700 Workstation is the solution that you have been looking for.

With SSD drives, RAM to meet their needs, Xeon processors and Nvidia Quadro graphics cards, these workstations have the horsepower to satisfy the demanding requirements of today’s complex CAD software.

Call us today to receive a customized quote and see how MSJ IT Services Inc. can help you improve your team’s performance with Dell.

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At MSJ IT Services, we aim to make email migrations painless for our customers so they can take advantage of new products on the market. For users that want to move to Google Apps for Business we now use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the migration.

Why AWS? AWS gives us on demand Microsoft Windows instances that have excellent network connections and scale for the size of migration. In addition, instead of being limited by a customer’s corporate connection and bandwidth limits, we have access to large amounts of bandwitdh. Lastly, the low prices of AWS make it easy to include the required server(s) into our flat rate migration price for our customers.

Are you interested in swapping email service providers? Give us a call to discuss the available options and what a migration entails.

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The truth is there are many simple things that can be done to fix your network to improve your kid’s internet experience. The solutions can sometimes be simple, but often times takes different techniques to get everything up and running smoothly.

MSJ IT would like to help get your network running smoothly this winter with our all-in-one network tune-up package. For $110 you can be your child’s hero!*

Call us today at 416 303 0228 to schedule an appointment.

*Does not include hardware changes

The post Be the family hero – get your home network fixed appeared first on MSJ IT Services Inc..

As a managed IT company, keeping passwords safe is a top priority. Many people use the same password for all their services, keeping them vulnerable to being hacked. This first product we would recommend for everyone is called Password Safe. Password Safe is a password manager that stores your passwords locally on your computer in an encrypted file. The tool makes it easy to have many unique passwords for each service you use. You remember one password and it remembers the rest for you.

If you have any products you would like to share, please contact us.

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Blitz.io is an online performance test tool that is easy to use, cheap and powerful. As always, I have tested it before recommending it to customers. I decided to test a hosted WordPress website on one of our public lab servers. I decided to try running a test that would scale from 1 to 250 concurrent users in 60 seconds to see what would happen.

Within 30 seconds, the server was overloaded. In fact, it was so overloaded that it had to be power cycled to bring it back to life. You can see the failure in the graph above.

It was time to rethink my plan of attack. Clearly, I could generate enough data with the free workload to bring the lab system to a halt. For attempt number two, I only did a test with up to 10 concurrent users. This time, the system survived to nearly the end, but then crumbled. I now had a fairly good baseline.

For the third attempt I enabled Apache’s Alternative PHP cache to see how much of a difference having all of the code cached would make. The results were promising, with one simple change, the system could easily handle 10 concurrent users with acceptable response times in the 150ms range.

Attempt four meant it was time enable caching within WordPress. I installed the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache and again fired off the 10 concurrent user test. The results were impressive. Response times were now in the 10ms range.

The final test was to try and tune Apache. Because the system is running only 613 MB of RAM, we need to greatly reduce the number of servers Apache was running. The number of servers was dropped to 10 and because I was feeling brave, it was time to run a test with 50 concurrent users. The results were fantastic. Our system could now handle 50 concurrent users with response times in the 20 ms range.

This research took very little time, cost only a dollar to run the Amazon EC2 instance and I had gleaned a lot of useful data. Based on this experiment I recommend that everyone give Blitz.io a try.

Would you like someone to help you with these tests? Give us a call or send an email and we would be happy to work something out.

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Before we continue, we should define what we mean by ultrabooks. Ultrabooks are laptops that are no more than 21mm thick, weigh less than 1.4kg and are priced for the mainstream while still providing excellent performance.

The move by the large PC vendors to deliver ultrabooks shouldn’t come as a surprise. Research by Morgan Stanley in November 2011 indicated that Apple’s ultrabook, the Macbook Air, made up 28% of Apple’s monthly notebook sales in October. These numbers show that there is a demand for this product and that PC vendors should probably try and grab some of that revenue.

The release of Windows based products is a major benefit for the business world. Companies that must use Windows based products are now afforded the luxury of carrying a sub 3 pound laptop that is 0.7 inches thick or less. These dimensions are especially beneficial for the commuter that uses transit and routinely takes their device home as they fit easily into bags and their low weight makes them easy to carry. In addition, the business traveller will also really appreciate the format. Unlike previous generations of portable devices, ie. netbooks, ultrabooks are no slouches as they come packed with powerful processors and flash based memory (instead of spinning hard drives) which provide drastic improvements for everyday performance.

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