The team at Muirfield would like to wish everyone a Happy Easter and to advise that our office will be closed on Friday 6th April and will reopen at 9am on Tuesday 17th April.

We hope you enjoy this holiday with your families and that you stay safe on the roads.

Muirfield’s SpamFilter servers are currently experiencing an usual high volume of mail caused by spam campaigns, as a result access to the SpamFilter’s web based Quarantine will be degraded.

Users may experience slow performance of the Quarantine service during this time.

Muirfield would like to advise that on January 18th/19th outages are expected across popular websites such as Google, Wikipedia, Flickr, WordPress and many others as a result of the online protests against proposed Internet Censorship Bills. These sites are planning Black Outs to demonstrate what may happen to the internet should the SOPA and PIPA bills be passed by US Congress.

For further information visit http://sopastrike.com/ and read all the discussion about it by following the #SOPAStrike hashtag on Twitter

Effective from 1st January 2012, both Seagate and Western Digital have advised that they are changing the warranty period for their internal hard disks products as follows:

Seagate

Constellation®.2 and Constellation® ES.2 – 3 years (eg, ST3500414SS, ST2000NM0011, ST9500620SS, etc)

Barracuda® and Barracuda® Green 3.5” Drives – 1 year (eg. ST500DM002, ST31000524AS, ST2000DL003, etc)

Barracuda® XT – 3 years (eg, ST32000641AS, ST33000651AS, etc)

Momentus® 2.5” Drives (5400 RPM & 7200 RPM) – 1 year (eg, ST9320325AS, ST250LT020, ST9500420AS, etc)

Momentus® XT – 3 years (eg, ST95005620AS, ST750LX003, etc)

Western Digital

Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue range will reduce to 2 years.

As long as anyone can remember Muirfield has always relied on the lovely Margaret Reilly to service the needs of our customers at our office reception or via phone call.

Margaret’s friendly nature and proficiency has enabled her to form many wonderful relationships with Muirfield’s staff, customers and suppliers over the years so it has been with great disappointment that we have recently announced that Margaret is retiring to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle effective Thursday December 22nd 2011.

Margaret has been with Muirfield for the vast majority of our 25 years and she has seen changes in her responsibilities, her workmates, our cliental, technology and even company ownership during her tenure. With great professionalism Margaret has adapted to these changes and continued to play a very important role within Muirfield during this time.

Our customers will all be very familiar with Margaret’s passion for the Carlton Blues and her recent travels around the world as Margaret has never been shy of having a yarn with anybody who will listen. On the flipside Margaret will also be recognised for her relentless pursuit of unpaid invoices in her accounts responsibility.

Our staff will feel a massive void around the office in 2012 when there is no Margaret to burst into song for every random event that happens and nobody to flirt with the techs. Margaret has been a wonderful friend to all the staff that have worked and those that continue to work at Muirfield, she is always able to have a laugh but still maintain her focus for her tasks.

I personally would like to thank Margaret for her loyalty and commitment to Muirfield for the past 20 years, I also would like to acknowledge and thank her for the friendship, council and “mothering” she has offered me throughout the past 20 years and in particular the last 7 years whilst I have been at the helm of Muirfield. I even appreciated her telling me to back off on the chocolate biscuits after my recent birthday.

I am very confident that I speak on behalf of Muirfield’s founders Colin and Pauline when I say that the wonderful experience I have had with Margaret as a Muirfield employee does not differ from that experienced by my predecessors.

On behalf of Joanne and the team at Muirfield we wish Margaret all the best for this new phase of her life, she is much loved and will be greatly missed.

Thank you Margaret.

Michael Muir

A comment from Margaret Reilly:

“As most of you are probably now aware, I will be leaving Muirfield Computers on Thursday. You may not realise that I have been working here for nearly twenty years, and as you will know, have always tried my best to be as helpful and friendly to our customers as possible. I have made many friends over the years, and have enjoyed my time here but I would now like to go on and do a few things I have been unable to do whilst working full time. I will really miss talking to everyone and listening to their travel stories and I hope they have enjoyed my stories as well. It has really made coming to work most worthwhile for me.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Pauline and Colin for giving me the opportunity in the first place and to Michael and Joanne for allowing me to continue on after they took over the business from them.

I would also like to add that I sincerely hope that Muirfield Computers continues on in a competent and successful way and I wish all my work colleagues the very best in the future (I will miss you all).

Love and Best Wishes – Marg Reilly”

As the festive season approaches we would like to wish our valued clients a very Merry Christmas and a Safe & Prosperous New Year.

We would also like to take this opportunity to advise that our office will be closed from Midday 22nd December 2011 through until 9am on Monday 9th January 2012, during this time our technicians are available for emergency support via our HelpDesk or by emailing support@muirfield.com.au

Due to electrical works being conducted at our office we expect to experience a brief telephone outage  from 3pm – 3:30pm today.

Should you wish to contact us during this time we request that you do so by emailing support@muirfield.com.au

Due to the recent floods in Thailand some of the world’s leading production facilities for hard disk drives are experiencing significant gaps between the supply and demand of these critical PC components.

We have already seen a three fold increase in our cost price of hard disks which is now having an impact on the price of assembled Muirfield and name brand PCs, these shortages are also expected to affect the cost of notebook hardware in the near future. Portable Hard Disks price have also started to show the impact of these shortages.

A round of recent media coverage on this matter can be found here.

The Muirfield office will be closed on Monday 31st October to allow our hard working staff the opportunity for a long weekend to coincide with Melbourne Cup.

We will however be available for emergency work if necessary. Our technicians are available through our HelpDesk or via email to support@muirfield.com.au

Due to an unusual amount of email traffic passing through our primary & secondary spam filters today we have noticed a slight delay in the delivery of mail to our clients.

We suspect that an attempt to send large volumes of spam to one of our hosted domains began at approximately 7am this morning, our spam filtering employs greylisting  technology which will reject these attempts however this heavy load is burdening our primary and secondary servers.

Our tertiary server does not appear to be suffering from the same congestion issues, as at midday it appears that traffic loads are returning to normal volumes.