Safety Issue
These devices, these tools, may be one of your greatest safety features that you will have. This can be incredibly important, can save lives, rescue from injury.
Computers, phones, the internet, these electronic gadgets are really just tools. OK, they may be toys for some as well. They are now relatively robust so you probably wont break them by experimenting with use.
I’ve just been going through learning some of complications of this with our telephone and the change from the “old” wired system to “new”, Voice Over Internet Protocol, VOIP.
These electronic items are important and useful tools even critical ones, and just like any other tools it takes a while to learn how to use them properly or even get them to work at all. Plenty of online forums, manuals, help pages for any of this so maybe its a bit pretentious to talk about it here but will nevertheless try adding some of our experience which maybe helpful for a few.
Telephone systems
Telephone systems: We have just been going through the landline change to VOIP and temporarly lost our old long standing phone number for a few weeks. Even some temporary numbers didn’t always work. A bit devastating for a small business. It was impossible to contact us by phone. Were we still alive, still open, we hadn’t skipped town with the £12.50 cash float from the till? OK, we did put some information about a temporary phone number here on our website, sometimes that number worked just not always.
We were without our phone number at the shop for a few weeks. This was all due to this changeover from telephone landline to Voice Over Internet (VOIP) and a very frustrating time.
Computer systems
With computers I started back in the dark ages of DOS before PCs, moved to buying a complete PC then realized the IBM PC were effectively assembled from standard components so started putting my own together to build what I wanted. It’s not difficult, but its not what you do to save money (at the start, yes, it saved money now costs can be about the same) its to put together the bits you want. Ready built ones can be a compromise on quality, on specifications, and, OK, not as much fun.
Using computers mainly comes down to the software. This has changed drastically over the years. Now with fancy graphics using much of the processing power making it more visually appealing whether its playing games or working on text, databases, photos or spreadsheets. They have become much more robust so some slight user error generally isn’t catastrophic.
Of course one can get into the arguments over Apple verses Windows, verses unix like operating systems, Linux, and which iteration. I’m not going their. After DOS I was using IBM OS2 which was great but lost the wars .. now using Windows
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