Welcome

Welcome to ESP Projects! We are a growing company based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and we provide IT Support, Web Design, Cloud Computing and other IT Services to any organisation. Whether you are a small or medium sized business or you are a third sector charity, we have IT solutions that will suit you. We will work locally, regionally or even on a UK-wide basis. Our clients include all manner of companies from small home businesses, to complex operations based across multiple offices. You can see what some of them say about us here.

ESP is committed to the concept of ‘Ethical IT’, and will always seek to build long term relationships based on trust, value for money and high quality solutions that are sensitive to your needs and budgets. You can read more about the ESP ethos here.

Help – My Computer is Running Slow – Maybe it’s the Disk!

We all know that feeling of opening your favourite most used program only to be presented with the dreaded spinning circle advising us to ‘please wait’. Even trying to open just a couple of your most needed applications only for your computer to be brought to its knees doing so.

It’s infuriating, especially when there’s no indication of anything actually happening other than said circle mocking you as it whizzes around happily. One of the main culprits for causing these symptoms is the speed of your hard disk; when you are opening programs and files, the disk has to search for and load a lot of information, older drives can only do this at a certain pace so they have to queue tasks which results in a slowdown for you.

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Windows Server 2003 – End Of Life

Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 is due to reach the end of it’s life in July 2015, meaning that Microsoft will no longer support the software with further patches or security updates. This end of life includes all versions of Windows Server 2003 and all the sub-editions of the product: the Itanium x64 editions, the Compute Cluster Edition, the Datacenter Edition, the Web Edition and the Enterprise edition.

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Responsive Design

Responsive Design

Here at ESP, we are often asked about Responsive Design with regards to a website; what it is, how it works, and why it’s something that we think is crucial to the success of a new website amongst its visitors.

Traditionally websites have been viewed on a PC (or Laptop) with the aid of a mouse for navigation. But nowadays more and more people are using a variety of devices such as smartphones and tablets, and using their fingers or perhaps a stylus to navigate instead. This change means that the way the website displays its content has to be thought about from a multi-device perspective.

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Windows XP End Of Life

Windows XP

As you may be aware from the previous articles, Windows XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft from Tuesday 8th April 2014.

What does this actually mean to your business and are there any risks to your network?

The simple answer is yes, the end of Windows XP support from Microsoft opens the door to major security risks to your network.

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Kerio Operator Phone System

Kerio Operator

We have been looking to offer a fully-fledged Phone System to our clients for quite some time now, and after testing many of the different systems out there we’ve finally settled on one which we believe offers the best feature set and provides good value for money.

Based on the common “Asterisk” Phone System, “Kerio Operator” is very flexible; it can be used in conjunction with regular ISDN telephone lines, or can also facilitate calls over the internet (VOIP). An outline of some of the features of this phone system are included below: 

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Windows 8.1 released

Windows 8

During October, Microsoft released the greatly anticipated Windows 8.1 update for its windows 8 operating system

Here at ESP we have been testing the Windows 8.1 release since it was made available via Microsoft’s beta programme.  2 of our tech support engineers installed the final version and have been using it as their sole operating system to gauge how the update has changed the feel of the system

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CTX gets a name change!

TT Exchange

The popular software donation website CTX (standing for Charity Technology Exchange) has officially rebranded itself as the Technology Trust, or TT for short.

The TT site currently offers Microsoft licensing at significant discount for registered charities, which has helped these organisations implement systems which without the discount on software would simply not have been possible. TT have also started to offer discounted software from vendors such as Symantec, Adobe and Citrix

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