The IT Experts

Pin Your Browser Tabs

Think about how you use your Chrome browser. If you are like most other people, you may surf the web, but you really utilize only a handful of websites. In fact, studies show that while people can visit dozens of websites a day, they only have five-to-seven sites that they visit every day. So if you need a website open in a browser tab, and you don’t want to risk closing it on accident, you can pin the tab to your browser. This essentially keeps the tab open and shrinks it to take up less real estate at the top of your browser. This feature is also available in Firefox, too. 

What a Pinned Browser Tab Can Do

With the header eliminated, you have more room for your other tabs, and you keep the website you need open, open. To pin them, all you have to do is:

1. Right-click on the tab
2. Select Pin tab from the drop-down

Obviously, you will probably want to unpin the tab. That’s just as easy. Simply select the proper option in the same drop-down menu.

When you pin a tab it moves it all the way to the left of your browser.

Another consideration is when interacting with a website that you’ve pinned. The internal links ( links that stay on that website) will open in the pinned tab as per usual, but external links will open in a new, unpinned tab.

Grouping Browser Tabs

Before we start, this process may require you to change some settings in your Chrome browser, so if you aren’t really certain about digging through Chrome’s settings, ask for help from your IT administrator. 

The newest version of Chrome lets you group tabs together. All you need to do is right-click on a tab, and it will give you the option to Add to new group or Add to existing group. Clicking these will create or add to a bundled set of tabs, all contained and accessible as a group. These groups can even be color-coded and renamed for ease of use. 

Google Chrome can help you be more productive by cutting down the time you actually spend surfing around the Internet. If you would like some help, or you would like to learn more about how to use the technology in your office, return to our blog regularly.

Review, Identify, and Parse

First thing’s first: you need to go over all your IT investments and related accounts to find any redundancies or excesses that exist—as well as identify any line items that can be put on hold for the time being.

For instance, the balance between your use of in-house solutions and cloud-based solutions. While too much investment into unnecessary cloud resources can hurt you, totally ignoring the cloud is equally detrimental. Finding the happy medium for your company’s operations will help you to optimize your invested costs, as well as single out those that are no longer needed. For instance, if you switched over to a new software, a few of the old titles could still be active on your network and slowly costing your business money.

Of course, whenever possible, you should simply suspend—not canceling outright—your investments wherever possible to reduce the amount you must pay. This makes it far more convenient to re-up your services as needed. This is where cloud services prove their value over an onsite hardware option in many situations.

Switch to Cost-Effective Options

In a similar vein, it never hurts to examine your cloud investments and consider if another provider would be able to give you a better deal for a comparable price. When it comes to such solutions, price comparison is always an intelligent strategy to take.

From cloud-based software suites to single-purpose platforms, such solutions can offer relatively low up-front prices and are billed monthly. This means that if you have no need for one of them at some point or need less or more than you have at the time, you can adjust your use accordingly.

In terms of your hardware investments, Bring-Your-Own-Device policies can help bring these down while simultaneously boosting employee engagement by encouraging your team members to use the devices they are likely most comfortable with.

Understand Which Costs are Fixed, and Which Can Vary

Many ongoing expenses are going to remain somewhat consistent over time—things like rent, payroll, and similar spending. These are the ones that you should consider eliminating, as they can’t really be scaled back. Variable costs can be, so things that are priced differently based on volume or frequency should be scaled back if possible.

By establishing your baseline operational needs and evaluating the necessity of any costs that exceed this baseline, you can greatly benefit your budget during tough economic times.

KB Technologies Managed IT and our scalable solutions can help you to accomplish this. Many of our services are dedicated to optimizing the IT budget you have available, and some could even help make your funds more productive. For more information, give our team a call at (954) 834-2800 today.

The Meaning of the “Power” Symbol

The symbol used to mark the power button is simply an amalgamation of the typical symbols used for power on and power off—the “|” for on and “O” for off combined into a single icon.

That’s about it. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

How the Power Button is Used

As has hopefully been drilled into your head by this point, the best time to use your power button is after you’ve saved your work and all computing processes have been halted. Even then, a better option is to use the operating systems’ shut down option.

Essentially, the only time it should be necessary to use the power button to turn off your device is if your device is no longer responding to either your keyboard or mouse. This is because abusing the power button can cause damage to your files, potentially corrupting them—particularly if any files or applications were open when you initiated the shutdown—and even preventing your computer from starting back up.

Of course, if your IT resource approves it, there are also ways to change what the power button does in the first place when you press it on a device running Windows.

Remapping the Power Button

The settings that the Control Panel makes accessible makes it simple to alter the power button’s function. Under Hardware and Sound, navigate to Power Options and select Choose what the power button does.

From there, you have assorted options. On a laptop, you can then select what happens either when you press the power button or when you close your device’s lid when it is plugged in or when it is running on stored battery power. Desktops naturally only allow you to change what the power button does. Your options to choose from include:

• Do nothing
• Sleep
• Hibernate
• Shut Down (only for when you press the power button on a laptop)
• Turn off the display (only when you press the power button on a laptop)

Once you have made your selections, click on Save changes and your preferred settings will be applied.

For more solutions that put the power back in your hands when using your technology—so to speak—and assist your entire business, reach out to KB Technologies Managed IT at (954) 834-2800.