Small Office, Home Office Information

by Stuart Livesey

Here’s a hat tip to Small Business SEM for mention of a a kit that every small business or home office person should have. So what’s in your marketing bag?

One of the benefits of working from a home office is that you don’t have far to travel to work. In our case it’s right across the hallway from our bedroom but that can cause problems.

We often leave our computers running all night because we’re often downloading files that clients want us to work on and that works well … except when problems happen … like this morning … Sunday morning at 4am.

One of my boxes started making a very strange noise and it woke us up. It didn’t take much to cure the noise in the short term … just a simple shut-down but the damage was done, we were awake.

Our friend who runs the computer shop we’re involved in happened to be awake too … as we found out when he emailed us at 4.15am so by 5am we were down at the shop having a new graphic card installed … one that doesn’t have a cooling fan that sucks dust in and destroys the bearings on the fan shaft.

And by 7.30 we were out of there and ready to head home to work - and back everything on this computer up because while he was replacing the graphic card Toni also spotted a swollen capacitor and the computer will be going back later in the week to have a new motherboard installed.

So thanks to our crazy friend from Fraser Coast Computers we got our computer fixed early on a Sunday morning before most people were even out of bed

And that’s just one reason we always try to deal with other small business people - they go out of their way to help customers because they know that if they want to survive then it’s all about keeping the customers satisfied. They might not always be working at 4am on a Sunday morning but they’ll certainly make the extra effort that so many big businesses aren’t interested in.

Here is a scary report about how easy it is to infiltrate the computer system of just about any business using email. Fortunately they seem to be targeting the bigger end of town at the moment but it’s only a matter of time before this type of attack starts to impact on small business too.

by Stuart Livesey

While some small business people may only work with one computer there are some who work with one in the office and one at home while others - like Toni and me - work between three. That means that keeping track of Internet bookmarks can be a real pain - and moving them across to a new computer can be even more of a hassle.

However, if you use Firefox the problem is solved with Foxmark. It will synchronise your bookmarks across all your computers and keep a master copy online so all you have to do is download it if you want to change to a new computer.

You can pick up Foxmark here

A hat tip to Webby Online for the link.

Current thinking is that the baby boomers - those people born between 1946 and 1964 - are either retiring or planning on retiring and having lots of fun as they grow older. They can do it - so the experts suggest - because they’re cashed up and can afford to.

But what if they’re not all cashed up? What if they don’t really want to retire? What if many of them are thinking of becoming involved in small business?

It seems to be a possibility that is becoming more and more likely and you can read more about it - and find some informative links -  at Will Baby Boomers Really Retire?

Some of the most effective advertising can say a lot without actually saying much at all.