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Green Guide - Some suggestions on how to save on your energy bills, reduce travel time and help reduce waste Microsoft Small Business Centre - Creating a sustainable Business (link to MS website) Website Design and Marketing - Be local, Buy local, Sell global Make the most of the internet to market your products and services (TIP - can you find your business on Google? If you can't then neither can your prospective customers.) Potentially reduce advertising costs associated with Yellow Pages ads and other paper based advertising mediums. Websites do not have to be fancy but they must allow people to find you when they search. Crimson Consulting will help you make your website more visible to Google and Yahoo and allow prospective customers to find your business. Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Marketing Do you really need Flash animations on your website? Certain websites need Flash animations to enhance the web users experience but use with care. Flash is not so easily analysed by Google, can take longer to load for the web user and uses more processing power (and energy) on the users PC. Older PC Ideas Older PCs that are too slow to run Windows can be reused as Linux-based firewalls (eg IP Cop) Disposal of e-waste to specialist handlers (eDay website) Move from CRT to LCD - If you are still using a large, heavy cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor on your PC consider moving to a flat LCD display as these use much less power.
An old PC starting to run slowly might just need more memory, some unnecessary software removing or checking for spyware. It is always worth checking an older PC when it starts to go slow - you might be able to speed it up again economically. Erase data before disposal - ensure that any hardware you recycle has all the data removed. Look for secure wipe software that writes random data to the hard drive and reformats several times to ensure that your data cannot be recovered. Do this in plenty of time as the process can take nearly a day to complete. Also ensure that any hardware like firewalls and mobile phones are reset to the factory defaults as these will also contain passwords. New PC Ideas Make sure you can upgrade the memory in a new PC. Some PCs and especially laptops have all the memory slots filled from new and so are not economical to upgrade later. Check to see if you can expand the memory in the future. Buy the best you can afford but not the very best you can buy. To explain this - if you buy the most powerful and expensive PC available you will pay a hefty premium but not get that much extra performance. However, if you buy the cheapest PC you can, you may find it won't run so well in a years time. It is best to buy just below the "very latest, most powerful" PC hardware to get the best price/performance deal and get a computer that will have a longer useful life. Printing (or not Printing!) Learn to file computer data and not paper printouts - take the time to learn to save web pages and other documents to your hard drive rather than printing them out. It is much more convenient to carry round a laptop rather than several lever arch files. Check ink cartridges for the date - ink cartridges have use by dates so make sure the ones you buy have a good, long date on them. When stored for too long the ink hardens and reduces the print quality. Try out refilled cartridges - if they work for you and they are cheaper, then use them. Share a printer in the office - a slightly more expensive shared printer will delivery a lower cost per page and higher print speeds than numerous smaller dedicated printers. Make sure the printer you buy is going to be the cheapest to run over its planned life. Try to estimate the number of pages per month you will be printing and find out which printer will provide the best value in the longer term. It may well not be the cheapest printer in the shop as the consumables over the life of the printer will really add up. Computer Management Make sure your antivirus and backups are good - all the files on your computer represent many tens or hundreds of hours of work (an therefore investment). Losing any data to a hardware fault or virus would be a huge waste of that effort.
Is your computer clean inside? - PCs suck in air to cool internal components. Dust also gets sucked in that builds up over time. This gradually makes the PC run hotter and may eventually lead to premature failure. Do you turn your PC off when not in use? An alternative solution is to use the hibernate function. Look under Start menu, Control Panel, Power Options to set up power saving features. Computer Tools Remote Assistance - available with Windows XP and Vista - allows a computer user to request help from a trusted friend or IT professional. The person assisting can be granted remote control to help solve the problem. This means the problem can be solved more quickly and a callout avoided. Remote Desktop - a computer user with Windows XP or Vista can securely remote control another PC. This takes a reasonable amount of time to setup securely. So this might be useful to remote control an office PC from your home PC and avoid having to drive to the office. Remote working via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) - encrypts all traffic between networks or PCs and so virtually creates a connection (securely) over the internet between the networks. Hosted Exchange - allows email, calendar, contacts and to do list to be available over a browser, PC client or smart mobile phone. Access to your information from virtually anywhere. Use a PC based diary - organise your time more efficiently and do more in the same place at the same time to reduce travel costs Web to SMS services - Use a web browser or PC client to send TXT messages to normal mobile phones. Cheap and easy way to give short messages to other people on the go. Conference call on Skype - If all the people who need to talk are on Skype then you can conference call for free with much better quality than a phone and when using a headset have your hands free to use the computer. If you want to have a cheap office based video conference facility and be able to share your PC desktop with other meeting attendees then consider using Microsoft Netmeeting. If you send and receive lots of faxes then using fax software from your PC or network would eliminate paper and toner consumable costs. Outgoing faxes can be queued and incoming faxes stored or emailed to the recipients. Fax management can be performed from your PC. Compare mobile data costs to travel costs - for example Vodafone charges $1 for 10MB of data on a daily casual rate. Enough for several checks on the email. How much petrol would you use driving back to the office? If you have a data capable mobile phone with bluetooth you can link up a bluetooth laptop and use it as a modem. Make sure the 2 devices are securely paired and you now have mobile data.
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Providing IT / computer services and support to the Nelson region incl. Stoke, Richmond, Mapua, Motueka, Brightwater and Wakefield |
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If you start to run out of disk space on PC consider purchasing a USB pendrive or external hard disk to extend your storage. These can be used with the next PC you buy and will prove more economical in the long run than installing a second internal hard drive. 
Do not use 3D screen savers - any screen saver that looks like a fish tank or a network of growing pipes takes up a good percentage of PC processing power. This significantly increases the electricity bill as the screen saver might be operational for hours each day. 
