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Preferred Blog

Preferred has been serving the Tinley Park area since 1991, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

How to Save a Website as an Application

How to Save a Website as an Application

If you feel like you have too many browser tabs open at any given time, then you'll be happy to know that you can sometimes save certain browser tabs as a standalone application on your device. This will give them their own icon and make accessing them much easier than constantly navigating to them through your web browser.

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Five Methods to Improve Team Productivity

Five Methods to Improve Team Productivity

If you want your organization to be efficient, you must increase productivity. However, this is often easier said than done, as plenty of obstacles, communication challenges, and resource allocation issues can stymie even the most well-thought-out plans. Let’s look at how you can improve productivity for your business by considering these common issues.

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How to Tell Your IT is Performing as Expected

How to Tell Your IT is Performing as Expected

One of the most important considerations that a business that relies on technology needs to make is how efficiently its technology works. Let’s discuss some ways to measure this benchmark and ensure that it is optimized to meet your business needs.

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Tip of the Week: Take and Share Screenshots in Windows 11

Tip of the Week: Take and Share Screenshots in Windows 11

A screenshot can be a remarkably handy thing to have on hand, for both your own purposes and especially for the purposes of technology support. While there are many tools out there that can help you take effective screenshots, there is a modern solution available for all users of Windows 11. Let’s look at how you can use it!

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How to Manage Google Drive’s Connected Applications

How to Manage Google Drive’s Connected Applications

If your business uses Google Apps, then there is a good chance that you have some sort of integration set up with other services. If you grant permissions to other applications or programs to access and use Google Drive, you should know that you have some power over these permissions, and it’s incredibly important that you understand what permissions you are granting.

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How to Help Keep Your Mobile Devices Kicking for Longer

How to Help Keep Your Mobile Devices Kicking for Longer

It’s a common enough frustration—just as you really need it, your mobile device’s battery is on its last legs. This is something that we all would like to avoid if we could. That’s why we wanted to take the time to share a few ways to prolong your device’s battery life just a bit longer.

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How To Design a Workspace with Productivity in Mind

How To Design a Workspace with Productivity in Mind

The workplace is, fittingly, a place for work to be done. While there are a lot of factors that can contribute to a person’s day-to-day productivity, having a space that is conducive to accomplishing their work tasks can be seen as essential. Let’s go over how you can design a workspace that does just that:

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Broken Computer? Do These Things Before Taking It to the Shop

Broken Computer? Do These Things Before Taking It to the Shop

Try as we might, we can’t prevent all computer issues from occurring—for instance, there’s not much that we can do if a stick of RAM dies, at least, not remotely. However, if you’re stuck with a broken computer and need to bring it in for repair work, there are a few things we recommend you do.

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How to Get Get More Done and Feel Better About It

How to Get Get More Done and Feel Better About It

Maintaining a standard of consistent productivity can be difficult. This is doubly true if there is constant distraction. For many workers, handling these distractions is work in itself. When trying to maximize productivity it is important to undertake actions that support that goal, and when there are a lot of consistent distractions, it is useful to have a baseline of knowledge on how to do just that. Let’s take a look at five solid tips to help you maintain productivity.

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How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication for Your Google, Apple, and Microsoft Accounts

How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication for Your Google, Apple, and Microsoft Accounts

Two-factor authentication is commonplace in the office environment, but it’s not commonplace enough, if you ask us. Too many organizations pass on it, placing their security at risk for no good reason. While the methods might vary, the benefits of two-factor authentication are too good to ignore. We’ll walk you through how to set up two-factor authentication for three of the most common accounts in the business environment: Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

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Working with Images on the Web, Part 2 - Resizing Images

Working with Images on the Web, Part 2 - Resizing Images

In a recent post, we talked about the various image formats you should use when sharing images over email or online. The goal is to generate an image (or images) that are the smallest file size possible to make them easy to share and quick to download, without reducing the overall quality of the image.

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Working with Images on the Web, Part 1 - Image File Formats

Working with Images on the Web, Part 1 - Image File Formats

Whether you are sharing them online, emailing them to a colleague, or putting them on your own website, it’s important to understand a few basics when it comes to image files and sizes. This guide will hopefully save you a lot of hassle when trying to email large images, update your website, and use social media, whether it be for your own personal use or for your business.

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Don’t Get Phished Out of Your Stimulus Payment

Don’t Get Phished Out of Your Stimulus Payment

Wherever there is money, there are scammers. So it may not be a big surprise that scammers are out en masse trying to get between you and your federally mandated stimulus money.  It’s bad enough that we’ve already seen a couple of phishing scams using the COVID-19 pandemic that are designed to help hackers get into accounts they have no business in, now that these scammers know that people are getting cash, the scams are kicked up a notch.

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Efficient IT Goes a Long Way

Efficient IT Goes a Long Way

With the COVID-19 pandemic causing businesses to rethink their operational strategies, many businesses have had to make a quick digital transformation. Many businesses have accomplished this before the stay-at-home orders, but with employees working from home, we thought this was the perfect time to take a look at four tools businesses can use to improve their work-from-home strategies. 

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Tip of the Week: Working Around Windows’ Restore Point Issue

Tip of the Week: Working Around Windows’ Restore Point Issue

One would think that a program called System Restore would be one that would be prioritized as one to get right. Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case, as utilizing one of your restore points after performing a Windows Update can cause some serious issues. For our tip, we’ll go over how to avoid these issues with a workaround.

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Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts for Slack

Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts for Slack

Collaboration is crucial in today’s work environment, which is one reason that solutions like Slack are so popular among businesses. Another reason that Slack is a popular option is how user-friendly it is - especially with the many shortcuts that are built in. We’ll go over a few of these shortcuts.

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Tip of the Week: How to Encourage Collaboration

Tip of the Week: How to Encourage Collaboration

Collaboration is a crucial business process in many ways, which means you need to be sure that your entire team is on board and prepared to participate. This week, we’re offering some tips to help you accomplish just this in six simple steps.

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Tip of the Week: Sync the OneDrive Files You Need with Windows 10

Tip of the Week: Sync the OneDrive Files You Need with Windows 10

Microsoft OneDrive is a cloud file hosting service that uses synchronization to allow users real-time access to saved information. OneDrive, is most associated with Office 365, to which it offers one terabyte of cloud storage (there is a free tier for consumers as well). Since OneDrive is often used to save Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote documents, having access to this information from your navigation pane inside of Windows 10 makes it simpler for users to get to files inside of OneDrive. Today, we’ll take a look at how to set the feature up to sync with OneDrive.

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Tip of the Week: Optimize Your Chrome Browser

Tip of the Week: Optimize Your Chrome Browser

Google Chrome is much more than just any old web browser; it’s the most popular web browser in the world, being installed automatically on Android smartphones and the browser of choice for countless desktop users. Today, we want to help you get the most out of your Google Chrome web browser.

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How to Leverage Parallelism to Up Your Productivity

How to Leverage Parallelism to Up Your Productivity

As unfortunate as it is to hear, science has pretty definitely kyboshed the notion that multitasking works. However, while multitasking may not actually have any true benefits to productivity, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any ways to accomplish more in less time. Today, we’ll give you a better option than multitasking, a process known as parallelism.

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      Over the past few years, huge scamming operations have operated in Southeast Asia, and now they are spreading. These scams—known as pig butchering scams—cause serious harm, as in an estimated $75 billion worldwide in 2023. With these sorts of operations spreading, let’s go o...

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      Best Places to Work - 5 YEARS STRONG!!

      Preferred is once again, honored for being a Best Place to Work for the fifth straight year!  Our team is what makes Preferred a Best Place to Work.  

      Daily Herald Suburban Business 2024 Best Places to Work Honorees The Daily Herald Suburban Business has announced the names of 51 companies, in 5 categories of competition, that are honored as the 2024 Best Places to Work in Illinois. This statewide survey and awards program was designed to identify, recognize and honor the best places of employment in Illinois, benefiting the state's economy, its workforce and businesses.