This year, I went a little overboard with my New Year’s resolutions. I'm all in, and by all in, I mean I have joined every gym and exercise class possible. In addition to CrossFit, I have started kickboxing, Krav Maga, indoor cycling, a running club, and I might even try yoga. After all, what better time to strive for change and self-improvement than the new year? Sure, we can commit to new habits any time of the year, but undeniably, there is more motivation once the calendar changes to January 1. Along with your goals for personal growth, what about making a resolution related to business?

I have a confession: I put up my Christmas tree in mid-November. Eager to fill my home with holiday cheer, I dragged my fake, pre-lit tree out of the attic, plugged it in, and expected pure bliss.  

SeqGen is incredibly dedicated to its customers and their machines. Your concerns are our concerns. We have recieved many emails and phone calls from our customers asking whether they have to upgrade their sequencing and fragment analysis software to work on the Windows 7 operating system. Like many major updates to these machines, this maintenance can be rather pricey. Before you write that check, you’ll want to make sure you actually need the update. 

Maybe it’s my obsessive behavior or maybe I’m paranoid, but as the seasons change, I feel the need to do thorough preparation on the home front. I pull out my trusty checklist of required maintenance and cleaning, then get to work.   

As the day wanes on, I find myself wondering, “What’s the point? Why do I exhaust myself fixing things that aren’t broken yet?” But then I remember Murphy’s Law – whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. If you simply anticipate and prepare for those inevitable little disasters, you can significantly reduce the amount of chaos you’ll have to deal with later. 

Not too long ago, I decided to switch phones. It should have been a simple process. Buy the new device, take it home, transfer my data, and carry on. But this time, something went wrong. Eager to start using my shiny new toy, I completely forgot to back up my data on the cloud. And as a result, I lost everything: my notes, my contacts, and several years’ worth of important data. When my cell phone rings now, I’m always left wondering – is this a friend or a pesky solicitor?  

You know the old saying – hope for the best, but expect the worst. At work and in life, setbacks are inevitable. This is especially true if you work with complex sequencing equipment. But with a little patience, any challenge can be overcome. And today, we’re taking on one of the biggest challenges our end users face: lasers gone bad.

We all know that uneasy, sinking feeling. It’s the end of the week, your machine is failing, and it feels like all is lost. Your plans to have a productive day at work are ruined, and so is your weekend. Sometimes your instrument has a different idea of fun. But that’s why you have SeqGen. Our expert team of service engineers are ready for any malfunction you might encounter. But before you give us a ring, there are a few simple steps you can take to expedite the troubleshooting process.

At SeqGen, we love sharing our best maintenance tips and tricks. The most rewarding part of running this blog is helping you learn more about your sequencer and how to care for it. Over the years, we've helped our end users troubleshoot all kinds of technical difficulties, from leaks to clogs to false error messages. But a lot of the questions we receive from customers circle back to the same problems. 

That's why we're diving into our archives this week and pulling our most popular, most requested blogs into one convenient post. After all, the classics never go out of style!

I am not a morning person. I don’t function well at o-dark-thirty. But thankfully, we have a wonderful invention called coffee. Each morning, I drag myself to the Keurig, place the cup under the spout and push start. One morning, I followed the same process and got nothing – barely any of the liquid cheer streamed out to fill my cup. Without proper care, the same thing could happen with your sequencer equipment. Instead of simply cleaning the outside of my Keurig and the cup holder, I needed to dig deeper and maintain the inside of the machine to keep my morning joy flowing steadily. 

It’s summertime, and for me, that means yard work. Or rather, my attempt at yard work. Last year was a scorcher, complete with water rations all over the country. But this year, I made a commitment to my yard to not let it die too much. To revive my brown paradise, I gave the task of watering to my five-year-old, who loves to soak everything and everyone in the process.

But when I went to turn off the hose, I was greeted by a massive pool of water, mud, mulch, and grass clippings just under the faucet. Clearly, water had been pushed in and out of the hose. However, I could tell a large amount had also leaked from the outdoor water faucet and started to build up. This gotme thinking — the same thing could happen with sequencer equipment.