As part of our normal operating schedule, several of our hosting servers will be undergoing routine maintenance between 18:00 and 19:00 tonight.  During this time, access to some services may be impaired or unavailable.

The ACS Support website will not be affected by tonight’s work and will remain operational should any customers wish to contact our support team.

For live status of all our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

As and when the maintenance work has been completed, our support team will update this blog.

As part of our routine housekeeping and maintenance cycle, our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting services will be receiving some attention tonight.

Part of this work entails the necessity to restart some servers for new settings and updates to take effect.  During this restart, access to some services may be impaired.

For the full status of our N&S servers, please visit http://status.namesandspace.net.

Of late, there have been a few files uploaded to some hosting accounts that contained viruses and/or potentially malicious coding.

Our policy on such malware (Viruses, Spyware, Trojans etc) is well established – we don’t tolerate them under any circumstances.  Any uploaded file found to be, or containing, Malware is permanently deleted.

All of our N&S servers run AntiVirus software that is regularly updated, with full system scans taking place each night.  Any infected file will be deleted without any prior notification.

We routinely carry out checks and maintenance work on our NamesAndSpace (N&S) servers to ensure they are in good working order and fully patched and updated against potential security threats.

For the most part, such maintenance work is transparent to most users.  We very rarely need to take a service like e-mail offline for any period of time, and if we do, it is only for a minute or so.

To minimise service interruption, we carry out such maintenance work during predefined windows when server usage is at a minimum.  This tends to be after 8PM at night, or during weekends.

Where possible, we advertise these maintenance windows at least 48 hours or 2 days in advance of the start of the scheduled work.  However, there may be circumstances where we may have no option to undertake work on little or no notice.

Notices on forthcoming and current maintenance work may be found on this blog, and also on the N&S Status Website at http://status.namesandspace.net.

As expected, on 14th April, Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows XP and Office 2003.  No further new function or non-security related updates will be released for either product.  Security updates will continue to be released until 4th August 2014, when Microsoft has declared that support for both XP and Office 2003 will formally end.

This is not entirely unexpected, nor is it particularly worrying.  No significant non-feature updates have been released for either product for a good while, and in the case of Windows XP, not really since Service Pack 2.  All Microsoft products are subject to a finite support life, and Windows is no different.  Existing installation will continue to be protected by Microsoft established security updates and patches.

For our support customers, this announcement does not equate to any realistic change in your systems.  Windows XP will continue to operate as expected, and given the average lifecycle of a PC, it is unlikely that you will still have any Windows XP PC still operational in 2014.

Microsoft has released a patch to correct the now well documented Zero Day Flaw in Internet Explorer that applies to all supported versions of Microsoft Windows.  The patch is available through Windows Update and provided your computer has been configured for Automatic Updates, you will be prompted to install it shortly.

If you are one of our corporate support customers, this patch will be automatically rolled out across your networks.  No further or direct action is required on your behalf.

The released patch only applies to versions of Windows that Microsoft still actively supports,principally:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Server 2003
• Windows Vista
• Windows Server 2008

As Microsoft no longer actively supports Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows ME, we would anticipate no correctiive patch will be issued for these operating systems.

This patch corrects a flaw that has been detected in Internet Explorer and its’ derivatives.  It does not apply to other Web Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome.

Our Support & Engineering team have implemented a number of vendor updates to correct a few issues with the Hosting Control Panel for NamesAndSpace accounts.  The Control Panel, accessible at http://controlpanel.namesandspace.net, faciliates easy management of all NamesAndSpace hosting accounts.

If you are unaware or have lost your Control Panel account details, please contact our support team via our Support Website.

Due to a recent update to the AntiVirus software we use on NamesAndSpace, we will be restarting our hosting servers from around 18:00 tonight (9th December).  Unfortunately, this restart is unavoidable.

We anticipate the downtime for each of our servers to be limited to a few minutes, and to minimise the inevitable service interruption, we will be restarting individual servers at different times.

If you have any queries regarding this, our rolling maintenance programme or any other support matter, please contact our Support Team via our support website, http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

As of the 1st December 2008, the Standard Rate of UK VAT is decreasing from 17.5% to 15%.  This change, whilst only for 13 months, will require changes to all software that performs any form of Accounting functionality that involves VAT calculations.

For the most part, this will equate to the necessity of either re-configuring your accounting software and/or installing an update from the original vendor.  If you have an queries as to what changes may be required, please contact either the software vendor or your Account Software support provider.

Generally speaking, ACS Limited does not directly support any accounting software (like Sage 200, Quickbooks etc).  Furthermore, some vendors require you to have a support contract in place (with them) prior to either providing technical support and/or program updates.

If you have any questions or queries regarding how this change may affect your IT systems, please contact your Accounting Software provider.  If you have any queries as to the installation of any required updates, please contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

One of the recent updates to AVG AntiVirus wrongly identifies a critical windows file (User32.dll) as a virus.  If this file is deleted, it will render Windows XP useless (the computer will either not boot, or endlessly reboot).

This problem should not affected the majority of our customers (if any at all), as it appears the problem is limited to AVG users who use the French, Italian, Netherlands (Dutch) or Spanish versions of Windows.

If you want to learn more, see Topic 1574 on AVG’s Support website at http://www.avg.com/support.