Suford has been making computers behave
for more than 30 years. She has built systems to fit the needs of users who had
no desire at all to become computer experts but had a wide variety of purposes
they wished their computers to help them with. Her clients are business people, college professors, military officers, manufacturing plant managers, writers, and artists.
Here are four examples of recent problems Suford has provided solutions for:
A financial planner was frustrated because her computer
took a long time to come up when turned on and displayed a lot of error
messages. Her applications did not always start and she kept getting messages
about memory in spite of having half of her hard disk unused.
Suford went to her home office and worked with her machine. She fixed the
problems with the slow boot-up and eliminated the error messages. She also
de-fragmented the disk to make better use of the space and eliminated the
intermittent application problems.
A writer was putting together an article and was having
problems because she couldn't get her illustrations into a format her word
processing program would take. She was working to a deadline and didn't have
time to do a lot of experimentation.
Suford had a similar computer with similar software and made a number of
experiments to determine which formats would work with both her illustration and
her word processing software.
Then Suford went to her home and showed her some helpful tricks and left her a
write-up on which files were compatible.
The new treasurer of a professional association got a disk
of files from the previous treasurer and discovered that it was not in a format
her bookkeeping program could read. She asked the previous treasurer if the
files could be put into some other format, but neither of them was sure what
format
that was.
Suford took the disk and read it on one of her computers, printed out a number
of reports, and put the data out in a special format. She then read it in with
the program the new treasurer would use and saved it onto another disk. The new
treasurer had all the old data and was able to use it.
A political candidate had her own files of supporters and
received lists of convention delegates from her party. Neither of these files
were in Access but she wanted an integrated database of all of them together and
she wanted to add a number of things as well.
Suford talked to her and to her computer aide about how the data were going to
be used and designed a number of reports and procedures. Then Suford took the
files, converted and combined them, adding codes to the records to distinguish
supporters from delegates of various types, checked for and eliminated
duplicates and installed the new database on one of the candidate's computers.
She then wrote up how to update and use the data and reports. | 
