Wired Office (est.2005) provide Microsoft Certified computer support services for business and home or home office in Joondalup, and Perth’s northern suburbs.

Are you looking for experienced and trusted computer repairs in or around Joondalup? Look no further!

Given our many years of experience and up to the minute technical knowledge we usually resolve computer problems very quickly, not just the issue itself but we will identify the root cause of the problem to help ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Three levels of service

1. safe, trusted remote access support means we can log in to resolve your problem and get it resolved without the need for a technician onsite. It’s also much cheaper. We have a quick fix option of just $49 for 30mins. You can call us 7 days a week.
2. If you are located in Joondalup or any of the surrounding suburbs you can bring your PC into our workshop in Duncraig. This is a good option for bigger jobs, such as putting in a new drive, scanning for malware, and so on, because we will give you a capped flat price regardless of the time we spend. So for most jobs you can know in advance. You still get our famous same day service or pick up next day service.
3. Like most other services we can attend onsite. This is usually same day turnaround. Standard onsite charges apply but no travel fees are applied.

We are available 7 days a week, by appointment (text or call first).

We fix problems big or small

• slow computer? This type of job is best brought into the workshop because you can save on extended tech onsite charges. Duncraig is only a short drive from Joondalup and close by suburbs. We can also clear your PC or laptop of malware with a remote access connection. Please enquire.
• viruses, malware, other threats? In most cases these bugs can be removed quickly, even when your own antivirus does not detect them.
• we do not make a profit on any hardware you require!
• swap out your tied hard drive with a super fast SSD drive and dramatically improve performance!

Computers attract dust because they often do not have proper filters. Computers are seldom opened for cleaning because of the out of sight out of mind issue and dust can build up until the PC shuts down due to ESD (electro static discharge).

Dust is a big problem for computers in business, industry and home, and can significantly reduce the lifespan of the electronics. Using canned air is a risk to health according to this article at wikipedia, and when canned air is tilted it may release refrigerants. Aside from this canned air is generally not strong enough to effectively clean embedded dust in CPU sinks and the like.

Air compressors are too powerful for the delicate electronics boards of computers. Many types of air tools such as compressors create static electricity which weakens computer main boards.

The safest option for forced air with enough velocity to power clean embedded dust needs to be an ESD safe device.

We can provide this type of de-dusting inside desktop computers whilst onsite for a general support service call – for home or business. If you can have the computers prepared for cleaning before a tech arrives it will cut down on time/cost.

If you are in Perth’s northern suburbs call to book in a support call out. You can also bring your pc to us for a through clean out (Saturday mornngs best) while you wait – for $25. Remember to call or txt first.

How to stop auto login to the last logged in user in windows 10. This question has been around since Windows 10 came out and there’s plenty of frustration showing up on the forums for windows 10.

There is a general war cry going, fix this bug Microsoft or I’ll go back to windows 7, or worse, I’ll turn to Linux! There have been registry hacks on various forums to change the value of the last user account but this has been blocked by recent updates.

To log into a different user account you can log in from with the exiting open user account. To do this just follow these steps:

1. from within the current account press windows key + L
2. the lock screen will be activated and in the lower left you can choose which account to login to

Recent changes made the other users show up at the logon screen. Look for other accounts in the lower left of the login screen.

There are plenty of blogs and articles around with convoluted explanations about wifi. Most of them will leave you non-technical types bewildered and none-the-wiser about which model to buy. At the end of the day you want to walk into a shop or buy a new modem/router online with the knowledge you need to make a sound buying decision.

Some of these questions will include:

1. Do you have a small house, a medium house or a large house?
2. How many people use devices, laptops, computers, android devices, ipads and iphone in your home?
3. Do you have a garage or external office that you need to get the wifi signal to with good reception.
4. Do you know the model number on the box is *NOT* the model number (for many brands including Netgear)
5. Do your research first and never fall for the version trickery going on.
6. Is there a lot of downloading and streaming in your house?

1. Netgear generally is my preferred modem. Let’s not get all technical and geeky. These are the best, most reliable consumer modem/routers on the planet. If you go to the Netgear product page and look at the details tab it will tell you if it is for small homes, medium or large homes.
2. the same product page will tell you how many simultaneous connections the router can handle. I find most average homes with a couple of brats will need 8 or more simultaneous connections to cover those almost always on at the same time devices, including AppleTV and androidTV’s.
3. You should not need to use extenders. These irritating things are a poor excuse for not knowing your stuff. The right router will most likely reach to every room. We use a signal meter to do a walk-through in the house and find the weaker points, then look for the optimum place to position the modem.  Some homes with reflective wall insulation for example can be problematic. For those without the luxury of a signal meter remember to use only channels 1, 6 or 11. Some detection software will suggest channel 14 is a stronger signal but if you choose any channel outside the 1-6-11 rule you will overlap with your neighbours wifi and cause both yours and theirs to have degraded performance. Finding the right channel without the right tools is tricky but sticking to the 1-6-11 is a good start.
4. The number shown on the box such as N300, or N600, or N900 is not a model number but the speed of the wifi, 300mbps, or if the router is a dual band model with 2.4ghz /5GHz that model-looking number is the combined speed of both bands. Confused? You’re not alone. The difference between the GHz range is 2.4 extends further than 5GHz. So 2.4 is usually preferred.
5. So many sell old stock online. It is critical you check up at the product page to find out ALL the versioning revisions (if any). If you have a version 1 of the Netgear wndr4500 on offer, but your research tells you there is a version 2, then it has to be version 2 you want because version 1 will be flawed. If you’re buying online it will mean a lot of email exchanges because they don’t seem to care, whatever it takes is the order of the day.
6. If you do a lot of downloading, movies, torrents, games, netflix, and so on, just remember you need a good quality router with plenty of memory inside the router, and a good processor chip. Modems delivered by the big ISP’s are usually cheap devices with poor routing capabilities. If you do a few movie downloads and your internet performance drops, or you experience drop-outs on the network, it might be a sign your router cannot handle what you ask of it.

Some routers are capable of upgrading from the vendors own internet software running on the router to powerful Linux based routing systems like DDRT and others. If you are doing a lot of downloading and movie watching these systems will give speed and stability to the right router.

One last word of advice, always change the default LAN password on your new router. I am referring not to the wifi password, but the actual router password. Most of them have admin or password as the default. If you want to see your router get hacked and a virus placed on router leave the password at the default.

Happy shopping!

Over the years I have seen a great many people who save documents which are in-progress to USB drives so they can continue working on the documents from various locations and devices.

Some of these people were students who put many hours work into a document or powerpoint presentation, doctoral students with just one copy of a thesis on a USB stick, medical and nursing staff putting hours into preparing presentations, manuscripts and the like. only to see the data disappear when the drive fails. USB drives are very flexible and convenient but also very prone to failure.

There is no need for any additional service or hardware for personal, professional users, but good common sense, freely available services and minor technical know how. The white paper shows you what I use, and what I have setup in the past for dozens of people to eliminate the risk of data loss completely. There are many websites offering various solutions but who do you trust? You need a best practice for critical data solution.

The white paper “How to never lose data again for professionals and students” also includes recommendations for disaster recovery for Office 365 and Sharepoint Server for Business. It is now available free with any service, otherwise for the one off price of $25. Order your copy today. Send an email or call to order.

I get a fair amount of questions about this topic of privacy on the start page of google chrome.

Not everyone wants the entire office or household to know at a glance which are your most recent or most visited pages on the internet.

Clearing the browsing history does not clear this cache. You can manually delete each page shortcut but they will just return a day or two later. The hide most visited extension is a handy plugin.

1. open chrome and type “hide most visited pages chrome”
2. choose the chrome webstore link
3. install the extension to keep your home page private

As always, only install extensions from the google web store for your safety.

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Call us today for trusted online computer support, malware or virus removal.

If you are still using Windows 7 you’re missing out on some great user experiences on Windows 10. We upgraded one of our office-workshop PC’s to Windows 10 and did not have any compatibility issues with the wide range of software we use, including a lot of out-of-hours music related programs. But overall one of my favourite things about Windows 10 is it is fast and smooth. If you upgrade your old mechanical drive to a solid state drive the performance, startup and shutdown times of your desktop or laptop will amaze you. You might not do much on your computer beyond pictures, picture editing, surfing the interwebs, and email, but it is a joy to use a fast computer and see programs open up as soon as you click them.

If you’re one of those people who have stuck with what you know best – windows 7 – it’s time to get with the program – windows 10.

For a while we are going to spend time with every new customer to demonstrate how to use windows 10. It’s my experience that people are more affected by change and navigation in new systems, once we show how easy it is to navigate the apprehensions seem to vanish.

Get windows upgraded by an I.T. pro ensures your settings are optimized, the system is installed correctly, and we may also be able to include windows 10 at no cost to you. Please bring your computer in or call for service onsite.

ipads and iphones do not have a lot of storage space so you can run out of space quickly. You already know this so lets get on to what we can do about it for the sake of brevity. I’m not going to talk about google photos because we are here today talking about storage, not editing, cropping, manipulating photos. We are talking about where to safely store your photos.

Backing up photos to highly unreliable external hard disks (and let’s not even mention backing up to notorious DVD’s) is probably the worst way to storage precious photos for most people. As a data recovery service our advice has always been to have very important data (photos) in at least two places. This might be on your computer or laptop hard drive and an external drive. On an ios device this might be the device plus itunes on your computer or laptop. All these above options are fraught with problems, confusion, and failure points.

Regarding ipads and iphones you could use icloud. I’ve never been a fan of icloud because it costs money to get real storage space, and photos are connected to the ios eco system with minimal or no support for editing tools like Lightroom or Photoshop. icloud also backs up all photos and I cannot micro manage them.

Now that google has created google Drive, a user friendly free app for iOS, backing up your photos is a no brainer. In Drive you can back up photos from the iOS app, and/or on your computer in Google Chrome, or using the Backup & Sync app for Windows you will find on the Google Drive website storage space. Once in the web space on Chrome you can also choose to turn on Google Photos and choose to upload only into Google photos. In the iOS app you will see the setting for upload image quality, from original hi res, the so-called High Quality but compressed image which reduces the file size dramatically, so you won’t get good quality prints from these uploads.

I personally don’t use Google Photos. But I do create sub folders to quickly and easily find the photos I’m looking for. Otherwise you might end up with a wall of photos and not very good search capabilities, especially for photos with generic names from a camera or iOS device.

The safety and security of your photos is mostly reliant on your password. Make sure you setup your mobile phone number as verification at your Google account, and choose a good password that is not in a dictionary, unlike Kirsten Dunst who apparently used the name of one of her cats who is a celebrity himself on her facebook page.

We offer a service to set google drive up for you via online support anywhere in Australia.

Not surprisingly one of the biggest issues we see in computer support is #slowperformance or performance related issues, such as slow browsing or slow email sending and receiving. The reasons why the computer is running slow are almost always multi-faceted but the biggest gripe of all is the sheer frustration of a slow computer.

Like anything mechanical/electrical and system dependant annual servicing will get your PC or laptop back to the performance you expect for the type of processor, ram and hard drive you have paid for.

We now offer this service type online, anywhere in Australia or the world. Maybe one day even Mars or Pluto. So give yourself a break from tedious performance and give us a call or send an email to get started.

We work weekends as well.

It seems there are a lot of people offering shonky online remote access support services. Many are not located on the Australian continent and falsely claim to have industry standard bona fides like Microsoft certifications.

We started offering local and Australia wide online helpdesk and general computer help online several years ago and have built a solid reputation for customers as far flung as northern Queensland, Darwin, Sydney and Melbourne, Adelaide and rural locations – all from our tiny office in Western Australia.

Our business has been running since 2005. We are Microsoft certified. Many calls are for quickfix, 30mins or less, such as setting up emails, quickly clearing annoying pop ups, installing a new program, updating your computer etc etc. So we have set up a $49 30 minute Quickfix from a qualified technician.

Call today for instant online help.