Keizer Computer It

08/26/2026

If you are selling a home and the buyer wants to meet on Zoom, make sure you use your Zoom, not theirs. If you use theirs, it may prompt you to update Zoom, and the next thing you know, it has taken over and potentially compromised your computer.

08/25/2026

Completed my Keizer Chamber greeters presentation this morning. Phew.

08/23/2026

That slow old laptop your employee is putting up with is costing you more than a new one would.

It's easy to treat a computer as something you only replace when it dies. As long as it still switches on, a new one feels like money you don't need to spend.

Every slow start-up in the morning, every wait for a file to open, every frozen call someone has to drop and rejoin is a couple of minutes gone.

It happens over and over, all day, to everyone stuck on an old machine. Add it up across a year and it's well past the price of a new laptop.

And that's before the frustration, or the fact that old machines stop getting security updates, which makes a slow computer a risky one too.

You don't have to replace everything at once. Just look at how old your team's computers are.

Around the three or four year mark is usually where a machine starts costing you more in lost time than a replacement would.

Ask your staff which computers drive them mad and they'll tell you straight away.

Your IT provider can also point out which ones are near the end of their supported life, since those tend to be both the slowest and the least safe.

Your technology should elevate your business, not weigh it down. Eliminate interruptions and downtime, increase productivity, cut costs, protect your business, and secure your network.
https://m.keizercomputer.com/

08/18/2026

Your customers are getting their answer before they ever reach your website.

Search Google for almost anything now and there's a good chance an AI-written answer sits at the top of the page. They already show up on a large share of searches, and that share keeps climbing.

When it's there, most people read it and never click through to a website at all.

That changes how people find you. Someone used to search a question your business could answer, land on your page, look around, and get in touch. Now the AI hands them the answer and they move on, and they never see you.

The businesses that get quoted inside those AI answers are getting more visits than before. So it's worth becoming the source it pulls from.

Start with your website. Make sure it answers the questions your customers ask, in plain words rather than marketing waffle, because that's what the AI picks up.

Keep your Google Business Profile filled out and correct.

And get your name onto other respected sites in your field. The more solid places that mention you, the more the AI leans on you.

If your visitors from search have been dropping and you couldn't work out why, this is a big part of it.

08/14/2026

https://keizercomputer.com/blog/how-small-business-ransomware-attacks-work-and-how-to-protect-against-them/

Small businesses are the most common ransomware target by volume of incidents, even though many small business owners assume hackers focus on larger organizations. A 22-person company has enough revenue to be worth attacking, no dedicated security team to defend it, and a publicly traceable footprin...

08/13/2026

Microsoft has installed Copilot on business computers automatically.

It's worth getting your files in order before you use it.

Copilot can see any file the person using it can already open.

In most businesses, that's a lot more than it should be.

Files get shared with "everyone" for convenience. Folders get opened up for a project and never closed again. It piles up over the years, and no one notices, because no one goes looking through it all.

Once Copilot is in the mix, people don't have to go looking. They ask a question, and it answers using anything it's allowed to see, including files that were left open to the whole company by mistake.

So before you let the team use it, get someone to check your file permissions, starting with HR and finance. People should only be able to see what they need to.

08/03/2026

Whoever controls your domain name controls your whole business.

Your domain is the address behind your website and your email. It sits in an account at whatever company you registered it with, like GoDaddy.

Anyone who can log into that account can point your website and email wherever they like.

At a lot of small businesses, nobody knows who has that login. It was set up years ago by a web guy who's long gone, or it's under one staff member's personal email with a password that hasn't changed since.

If someone gets into that account, they don't need to hack anything else.

They can send your website visitors to a fake page that still shows your real address.

They can take over your email and reset the passwords on everything tied to it.

They can send your clients an invoice from your real address, and your clients will pay it, because it came from you.

So go and check who controls the account, whether it's got two-factor login switched on, and whether the domain lock is turned on, which stops anyone moving your domain elsewhere.

While you're in there, set it to auto-renew so it can't expire.

07/23/2026

If you deleted a OneDrive file recently and went looking for it in your Recycle Bin… surprise, it's not there.

Starting in May 2026, files deleted from OneDrive or SharePoint in the cloud no longer appear in your local Recycle Bin or Trash.

They are removed directly from your device and can only be recovered from the OneDrive or SharePoint web‑based recycle bin.

1. Go to onedrive.com or your SharePoint site

2. Click "Recycle bin" in the left menu

3. Right-click the file and select "Restore"

You typically have 30 days before files move to the second‑stage recycle bin (which most people don’t know about), and up to 93 more days there, depending on your organization’s settings.

After about 123 days, they’re gone for good.

07/18/2026

If you signed up for AI tools over the past 18 months and haven't reviewed them since, you're probably wasting money.

A March 2026 audit of 102 small businesses found that 87% had significant waste in their AI subscriptions, with a median of $18,000 wasted per year.

Most owners go through the same pattern. You signed up for ChatGPT, then Claude, then a transcription tool, then a meeting note-taker, then a writing assistant. Most of these tools now do what the others do.

Three signs your AI stack needs an audit:
▶️ You're paying for two tools that do the same thing
▶️ Your team stopped using a subscription you're still paying for
▶️ You can't quickly explain the ROI of each tool

While you're at it, check the security too:
✅ Make sure every tool is on a business plan with a "Do Not Train" clause. Consumer plans feed your data into the model.
✅ Remove access for ex-employees. AI tools get forgotten during offboarding.
✅ Check what's connected to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. AI tools often have access to your email and files you never noticed.

07/13/2026

If you've ever spent 5 minutes hunting through Teams trying to find a meeting recording, there's a feature you should be using.

It's called the Meet app, and it's already built into Teams. No Copilot license required.

The Meet app gives you a single dashboard for every meeting you've had or are about to have. Click on any meeting and you get the agenda, recording, transcript, chat, and shared files, all in one place.

To find it:

1. Open Teams

2. Click the three dots on the left navigation bar

3. Search for "Meet"

4. Right-click and pin it so it stays in your sidebar

Once pinned, you'll see two views: upcoming meetings and past meetings. Click any past meeting to see everything tied to it.

Finding what was discussed in last month's leadership review used to take 5 minutes of digging through your calendar, recordings, and SharePoint.

With Meet, it takes 30 seconds.