Work From Home | Tips & Tricks
Because of the Corona crisis, many people who used to work in the office now have to move to the home office, or are looking to work from home. But working from home has to be learned. In addition to the many opportunities for distraction, there are other jobs challenges. For example, you suddenly find yourself responsible for the IT infrastructure. To make the best use of your home Internet for working from home, we have compiled the top 5 home office Internet tips:
Making a computer or laptop more powerful
What kind of work can be done from home, some people now wonder. What is certain is that many private households now have an Internet connection that can keep up with the speed of the line in the office. But if your computer or laptop at home is always down, even the fastest Internet connection won’t get you anywhere fast enough to do online workfrom home. So clean up when you notice that your computer is overwhelmed.
To find out which program is slowing down the work process, you can use the so-called Task Manager on a computer with the Windows operating system. With this tool, you can see what performance is being used by each program. If you can do without programs that require a lot of power, simply close them, but don’t forget to save any documents or other important data in the program you want to close. Restarting the computer can also work wonders to terminate processes that slow down the computer unnecessarily.
Optimize Internet router and check subscription
In order to connect to the Internet at home, one usually needs a router and an adequate Internet subscription that meets the desired performance requirements. Today, laptops usually connect to the router via WLAN, which itself is connected to the fibre optic network or DSL network with a cable. If your internet is slow, it may be because your internet router is outdated. It is therefore worthwhile to use working from home as an opportunity to renew your home IT infrastructure.
Alignment of the router antennas and relocation
In addition to the device itself, other measures can also help to increase the performance of the router, such as by reorienting the antennas. Sometimes it helps if you move the router to a different location in your home. Just try different locations.
Change WLAN radio channel and purchase a repeater
If WLAN reception is poor in certain places in the apartment or house, a so-called WLAN repeater may be able to amplify the signal. Another way to increase performance is to change the WLAN radio channel if the currently set channel is used by many other users. You can change the radio channel in the router’s settings. Just choose a channel that is not used by many other users. This way, you can maintain a stable Internet connection and achieve a higher speed.
Noise cancelling headphones for concentrated work
Today, information is not only available in written form. Often information about movies is spread or audio files are distributed. Even video chats or even video conferences are becoming the norm when the entire team moves to the home office. In order not to disturb the whole family with the sound coming out of the loudspeakers, headphones should be used.
By choosing the right headphones you can solve another problem. There are headphones with a noise cancelling function, which protects you from being disturbed by ambient noise and allows you to concentrate much better on your work. And if you’re going to buy new headphones, you should also buy a decent microphone that will help you to be understood during conference calls or video chats. For video conferencing, you can access various providers. Here are a few solutions as examples:
- Hangouts Meet as part of Google’s G Suite
- Microsoft Teams
- Adobe Connect
- Skype
- GoToMeeting
VPN – virtual private network for secure communication
If you work from home, it is common practice to connect over the Internet to the servers of the company you are employed by. You exchange important data with these servers, or certain programs are run on the servers that you need for your work. A connection to the employer’s servers can be established via a virtual private network (Virtual Private Network, or VPN for short), which works like a tunnel, thus providing a certain degree of security against unauthorized access to the data streams. For certain jobs from home it is therefore important that you have the appropriate access data for the VPN network.
App for scanning documents
Not everything is digital. While you’re working, you may come across a paper document that you need to share with the team or send to a customer. The easiest way is to scan this document and then send it by e-mail or via an instant messaging service. For this purpose, one can put the document on the scanner and partly send it directly from the device to the desired e-mail address. Those who do not have a scanner can take a picture with the camera of their smartphone. But oftenly, some unattractive edges remain here. In order to make the “scanning” with the mobile phone easier, there are some special apps in which one can, among other things, trim and straighten the scanned pages.
And here once again the top 5 tips for online jobs from home:
- Making a computer or laptop more powerful
- Optimize Internet router
- Noise cancelling headphones for concentrated work
- VPN – virtual private network for secure communication
- App for scanning documents
Upgrade to fast Internet and also switch off sometimes
If you do not yet have sufficiently fast Internet access, you can use the Internet subscription comparison on Alao.ch to find the cheapest and most suitable subscription. The free and non-binding Internet provider comparison will not only save you money, but also time. The desired subscription can then be ordered completely digitally, directly and easily, without any paperwork.
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If you just want to switch off after work, you may also be interested in our current Netflix offer.
With our service you get a Netflix voucher of CHF 25.
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