Small Office, Home Office Information

It’s been an interesting week with lots of changes on the Web to keep up with and plenty of work coming through the door from new and regular customers. Word-of-mouth has got to be the best advertising you can ever invest in and that’s a concept that so many small businesses still fail to understand.

Of course times are tough and likely to get a whole lot tougher for the small business sector so I thought I would share this page with you. It’s a list of 51 different free computer programmes. Not all of them will be suitable for your business and some - like the registry cleaner - I would NEVER use but there are others that you will find useful.

There’s OpenOffice that gives you a whole suite of office software, PDFCreator that can creat PDF files from any printable document and plenty more that you may find useful.

by Stuart Livesey

According to Dell small business certainly is affecting the sales of Vista and not in the way that Microsoft would hope for.

It seems that the small office/home office market isn’t much interested in buying new computers with Vistal already installed. We radical little business people would prefer to stick with XP and why not? All our software works with XP but doesn’t always work with Vista.

Of course Microsoft has a solution - they’re going to withdraw XP from sale to computer makers so that we’ll be forced to buy the new product.

You can read the full story here

by Stuart and Toni Livesey

You may find you have some hardware issues so it’s better to be save than sorry. Microsoft has a free Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and the experts suggest that you should run it before trying to upgrade.

If there’s going to be a problem it will warn you.

Hat tip to All About Microsoft

Yeah … I know it’s Sunday but …

Over the last couple of weeks my main desktop computer has begun to act rather strangely. Copying and pasting anything has become a real pain as often whatever I paste gets pasted twice - images are beginning top open from the bottom up instead of the top down and having a couple of Firefox windows open at the same time often leads to the computer locking up.

It’s also nearly 4 years old and has run almost 24/7 from the day it arrived. So now it’s time to for a new motherboard. I’ll keep the same processor but it’s going to go into a smaller box similar to the one I talked about here at Space the Final Frontier.

I’ll also be adding a new hard drive and the old one will become a slave for storage.

So all that means that today I’m backing everything up. Of course, I could just leave it till the computer comes back from the shop and then just transfer everything from the old hard drive to the new one but the files on the old hard drive are valuable to our small business so today is going to be spent backing everything up onto a a stand-alone hard drive that we use for storage.

Accidents can happen and important data can be lost when a small business computer goes in for repair.

I know you think they look strange.

And you’re right, they do look strange and they look like they would be an absolute pain to use but if you or the staff in your small business can type with more than just two fingers - and you spend a lot of time pounding the keys - then an ergonomic keyboard is an absolute must.

I learned to type on an old Remington typewriter almost 40 years ago and since then I’ve used a wide variety of keyboards and these ergonomic keyboards have to be the best I have ever used.

I had one of these several years ago and when it died I decided to go back to the standard keyboard for some reason I now can’t remember. But last week when one of Toni’s keyboards died we did a little shuffle and a nice new black version of the board you see above arrived on my desk. And I’ve fallen in love with them all over again.

The one I’m using is a Belkin Ergo Keyboard and if you live in the US you can pick one up cheap from Amazon (yes that’s an affiliate link).

Here in Australia you can find them at any good computer store (around $A59.00) and I’m sure the same applies in other parts of the world.

It might be cheesy but it’s a fact if you have a busy desktop in your small business or home office

Space is a major problem for many small offices and fitting a PC somewhere on your deks can be a difficult.

The other half of this partnership had been telling me for ages that there was a solution to my space problems and it really did take a while for that to sink in but last week it did and, as I said last Friday, I did a little upgrade of one of my PCs on Saturday to fix the space problem. And this is the solution to my space problem:

This is the Aspire X-Qpack Micro ATX tower (sold in some countries as the Apevia X-Qpack) and it’s just 13.8″ long by 11.2″ wide. It stands just 9″ tall.

And if you think you can’t fit everything that’s in your current PC into one of these small boxes let me tell you that the one I currently have on my desk holds 3 hard drives, a DVD burner, a floppy drive, a dual head graphic card and a firewire card and, thanks to bigger fans and better ventilation than you’ll find in most towers, it runs cooler than the box it replaces.

After working that computer hard for the last week I can tell you that there have been no temperature problems and it has worked perfectly.

Not only are they small but they’re light-weight too and come in a range of colours. If you’re here in Australia check your local computer shop (because of their size only certain motherboards will fit in them) and in other parts of the world you will find that they’re available from Amazon (aff. link).

I know lots of small businesses and home offices run on Dell computers so this piece that I ran over on Home and Small Office Computer Guide might be of interest to you.

CNet is running a news item that suggests that Dell is preparing to announce “a major price initiative” for consumers and small business customers.

You can read the details here but they would have to be giving PCs away before I would think of switching to a Dell.

A wander through their customer message boards or a search in Google will soon turn up enough information to make you want to think twice.

The computer shop that we’re involved in currently has a beautiful wide screen Dell monitor sitting on the floor. It was brought in by a customer who said it stopped working the day after the warranty period expired and it cannot be repaired.

There is a lot of money tied up in something that is never going to be anything more than a boat anchor … or a prop in the shop’s next television commercial.

Have you ever noticed how manufacturers often allow the products to grow in size over the years? Car manufacturers start off with a model that is small and compact and over the years the car gradually increases in size until they have to go back and launch another small, compact car to take it’s place.

Laptops are the same. They were originally designed to be light and portable but over the years they have turned into back-breaking monsters that no one would really want to carry too far for too long.

Over the weekend I was in one of the Office Works stores down in Brisbane and saw the Fujitsu LifeBook P7120. There is no doubt that it’s small - the screen size is just 10.6″ and it weighs 1.38 kilograms. It will run on battery power for over 7 hours.

Now with specs like that you would have to think that it would be a serious contender for any small business or home based business that was looking for a laptop to go on the road with them. The only problem is that it’s a tad expensive.

But if you’re interested here is the link to a brief review of the Fujitsu P7210 laptop

How do you store your business records?

These days, with so much of our business packed into that whirring computer box, it’s only natural to think to storing your data on CD or DVD. After all, these days every computer comes with a CD or DVD burner so why not use it to store your data?

We certainly do, we have business records and important business files stored on CD going back as far as 1998. We also have a lot of our family records stored on CDs. Treasured photos, important family history papers going back to WWI have all been scanned and burnt onto CDs.

We have always known that CDs are prone to fail after a few years. I’ve mentioned it here before that cheap CDs are not ideal for storing important files because they deteriorate after just a few years. But now it seems that experts are also suggesting that good quality CDs are not ideal either.

Long term storage on hard disks is also not recommended because mechanical failure is quite likely.

Kurt Gerecke, a data storage expert with IBM, suggests that the only safe way to store important data is via magnetic tapes. He suggests that even good quality discs are unlikely to last beyond five years and el-cheapos bought at the local discount store are not going to last more than two years.

You can read the full story here at Computer World

Daring to call someone who was peddling this sort of crap software a snake oil salesman made for a rather amusing week last week.

So it was interesting to see that Bruce Cramer from Cramer’s Computer Services in San Antonio had a similar view to my own. Here is what Bruce has to say:

With the proliferation of spyware, or malware there has also been a proliferation of applications claiming to be your partner in fighting the problem.

Many folks get into a jam worse than they were in before they started using what they thought was a legitimate antispyware program. Rogue antispyware programs usually start out by alerting an individual in some unambiguous way, perhaps through a pop-up or unsolicited email (spam), that they have a spyware and or virus problem.

They will urge the person to buy or use their product. It may even tell them that they that it has already found (through osmosis I guess) a large amount of spyware and that by purchasing their product you will be free of the ugly vermin once and for all.

Not only are these programs digital snake oil serving no useful purpose and charging $30 and up, but it is like having a mole or insider infiltrate your computer. Once the rogue program is in your system it opens the door for other malicious programs to come in and wreck havoc on the computer.

Most of these programs go by heroic names such as Error Guard and WinFixer, or other names that sound very similar to reputable, well established antispyware programs. The user should not be fooled by the name or its claim or you could be in for a long ride.

Once the seed is planted and the rogue program has opened the door for his partners in mischief the programs will work together try to ensure their survival so it is not as easy as terminating a singal piece of spyware. After one is gone another one will take his job sometimes even regenerating the one that was just terminated. Once these guys have enough for a full team it can be an uphill battle unless the user has some experience in dealing with the tactics they employ.

What the user can do to protect themselves: First of all, be wary of any antispyware application that does not offer a free, fully functional, trial of their product. If it can’t be driven it around, kick the tires and ask some questions through tech support, either by phone, email or website because it might not be the real deal. Don’t buy from a pushy salesman, meaning don’t buy from spam and pop-ups.

Don’t be fooled by the fools.

Stay safe and happy computing.

Cramer’s Computer Services provides In home, on site computer service in the San Antonio area. Specializing in virus and spyware removal, upgrades networking and more.

Cramer’s Computer Services
210-865-2933
http://www.mysahomes.com