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Despite it being a digital world we all still seem to need printers. There’s no shortage of them, but due to the way they’re sold, finding a good deal can be a bit of a challenge. The way to find the right printer for you, and one that won’t cost you a ton to run, is to think about how you’re going to use it.
What do you use it for?
The best way to determine the printer for you is to look at how you’re going to use the printer. By that I largely mean two things: how much will you be printing and what sort of things will you be printing?
Printer choice basically comes down to inkjet or laser (there are things like solid ink printers too, but they’re mainly limited to bigger machines and if you see LED it’s the same as a laser). Inkjets are generally cheaper to buy up front, but will cost you more over time/prints, while lasers require a higher initial investment but pay back the longer you keep them.
To determine which best suits your needs, first think about what you’re going to want to print, especially if you’re going to print colour. Next you need to look at print volume, how much are you going to be printing? Not just on a weekly basis, but also in batches.
For example, if you’re only going to print once a week, but you’re going to print 100 pages, you’re probably better off with a laser as the inkjet (despite massive speed improvements) will be slower, unless you’re prepared to be patient. Largely it comes down to higher volumes mean laser, lower volumes mean inkjet. Personally, I’d recommend a laser if you’re not doing much or any colour printing regardless. Continue reading…
25th April
I was getting the following error when trying to login with accounts that had not used a specific machine before:
User Profile Service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.
The various fixes I found online (including Microsoft) stated it was a corrupt profile and sent you looking in the registry for certain keys, but this user had never logged in to the machine, so it couldn’t be that. Any account which had previously logged in worked fine. I finally tracked it down (with some hints from online).
My issue was caused by the inability to copy a specific file from a sub-folder of the Default user profile. To find this out I checked in the Event Viewer and under the Application events it listed the specific file it was having problems with (in this case under the Local profile, it was a file in the Windows Live folder).
I simply deleted the file (note that you have to show hidden folders to see the Default user profile folder) and the accounts were able to login again.
27th February
Lifehacker have a great infographic, courtesy of Killer Infographics, that shows the dos and don’ts of picking a password to insure it’s strong and therefore safe. It’s a fun way to understand what you should be doing to select your password.
Click the image for larger version
2nd February
An email address is pretty much a necessity these days and there are plenty of ways to get one. When you sign up for broadband with an ISP (BT, for example) they will typically offer you an email address. I still come across a lot of people using these addresses, but I would like to put the case for why using this (certainly as your main contact address) is a very bad idea no matter if you’re a consumer or a business.
The Lock-In
At least one of the reasons applies equally to both consumers and business and that’s simply that if you move providers, you can’t take your address with you. That might not sound like much, but remember how many services you sign up with using your email address. What happens if you forget a password and want to reset it? Or miss an important reminder/update as the email address not longer exists? What about all those people who have you in their contacts under that address?
And it’s not just you, there’s everyone else in the family/business who uses addresses for the service.
For businesses it’s even worse, not only would a change in ISP mean you’re uncontactable, it may end up costing you a lot of money in missed business or fines/charges because you didn’t receive important emails.
So what happens? Well, you end up being unable to move for fear of losing emails, so you can’t switch to take advantage of better deals elsewhere, so it ends up costing you money (and hassle if the service is particularly poor). Continue reading…
12th January
I was reading an article calling for the government to make more use of open source software and it rang some bells. I’m the IT Manager of an SMB, so I’ve usually got one eye on our spending and am looking for ways to cut those costs. As such I looked at converting our business to run on open source alternatives, possibly not across the board, but as we have a split between what those at head office use their PCs for and the much simpler tasks required at the branches, I thought it could potentially help save money.
Evaluating Costs
As we’ve already bought the hardware and they came with licenses for Windows there wouldn’t be any direct saving in the costs of the operating system if we switched to another one (Linux for example). Even on new machines, the cost difference between a machine supplied with Windows and without is about £70 (assuming you can find a vendor who sells machines without it) which equates to about £1 a month over the typical three-year life of hardware. Not exactly massive.
We could potentially (perhaps unadvisedly) save the cost of our anti-virus software. Longer term there are potential cost savings in being able to continue using the existing hardware when Microsoft stops supporting XP in 2013, certainly the existing machines will not support even Windows 7.
Against it I had to weigh the cost of the extra time it would undoubtedly take to support users on a new OS. Continue reading…
5th January
