What would you buy for a printer these days?

Let’s just say you won’t buy that dot matrix printer for sale on ebay. If you think anything is as good as anything else, well, you’d be wrong.

First off, you really don’t want to save some bucks with printing cheats. I mean, if you don’t want to throw your money away there are plenty of ways, your printing should not be it. Mock me not on this, cheap cartridges are not a way of saving money.

Office printing should be a quality product of yours, no matter what your printing, it sell a good amount of your corporate image, so don’t go cheap on this.

Try to focus on being effective and efficient. Think about the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe this entry is already old before I post it, but reality shows me every day it maybe not,  since there are a lot of offices out there that still have monitors on their desks that could have easily be built all the way back in 1980.

And it is really bad PR. CRT’s look really bad, not only because it sells an image of indifference towards technology, they are difficult as hell to clean and they use an enormous amount of space on the desk.

I don’t want even to get started with those places where image is the thing to have in mind, like the receptionist’s desk or the free Internet computers at the hotel’s lobby.

If your computers are going to be there to the public, customers or clients to see, you should be thinking about changing your monitor fleet to LCD. Mainly because they are so much prettier, but also the consume less energy and (of course) cover less space. They are so much easier on the eyes and I promise none of the myths surrounding the flat panel displays are going to become true.

I recommend the Samsung LCD systems, mainly because they always make me happy enough, contrast and speed ratios are acceptable in all the product line. Oh! and in my opinion they price tag is also right.

But if image is your thing, then you could look at the high end devices, there are some really tasty!

The Asus EEE, for those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, is a UMPC that costs 400 bucks in the US and come (as you read) in Windows and Xandros flavours. It supports a 2 GB expansion and etc, etc etc.

Talking of it like that is really boring, you can read that, by better informed people elsewhere. What I want to tell you is who should buy it and who shouldn’t.

• Salesmen: This is great for you, only thing to care about is battery life. But with a car charger it’ll all be good.
• Designers: You need to buy it if you’re the PowerPoint presentation kind of guy. If not this is not an option, a 7 in. screen is no place to work, and though you could plug in a mouse, it would be very uncomfortable to design on it.
• Bars: no use for you guys
• The integrated camera and the ability to connect to the world via WiFi makes this gadget a must have tool for the average executive.  Word and Excel documents are easily modified and reviewed and your mail will be with you… always.
• If I was a writer this would be my travel machine, it’s really light and maybe the keyboard is too small, but that is not really something that will make you uncomfortable.

Ok, a said it before but I’ll say it again, no camera is suitable for everything, there is no BEST CAMERA for all things to be done. So, as I anyway want to talk about it, I’ll narrow it down a little bit. So I decided I’m starting with what is the best camera for a Bar.

The best camera for a bar

I can hear people saying “What for?” Well, a camera is allways something you want around, the time allways comes (you never know when is a celebrity going to shhow up). Anyway, a camera that’s going to live in a bar needs to be really good at some specs and there are others that are not that important. So, now that you’re maybe thinking to buyone this things you should have in mind.

• good pictures with no light for obvius reasons
• Good to excelent battery life
• Space and the ability to stance is not something abundant in a bar, big focal apertures and good focus range is extremely important
• 4Mp today is the minimun out there, that should do it, you don’t need that much resolution in this field.
• Try not to choose a vanilla camera. Handeling the gadget can get very rough in a bar.
• Try to keep it cheap, run away from the costly adons (like memory stick)

Cameras improve every day, and this one I’m going to recomend it is not going to last as the best in the field, but if you cover the obove, I imagine your’re covered. For what it’s worth I think de Kodak EasyShare D6490 that you can get these days for around 140 bucks.

This issue always finds me arguing with people about it every time it arises in a conversation.
I think there are little to none businesses left that don’t need internet. And it doesn’t matter whether you have a jeans store a TV producer office or if you’re a dentist. If the governing idea is to deal with people, if they find out how, they will be coming to your place, and when they do they won’t like to feel “disconnected from the world”. Making people feel comfortable can never be a bad. Worst case scenario they won’t mind returning.
So, for when you install a hotspot, I think you should think about these things.

1. Buy a powerful and compatible wireless router (specially in big places). Vista does not work with every router out there.
2. Change the name of the network to your business name
3. Don’t encrypt the connection. You can always keep free riders outside by using a mac address filter.
4. Publicity. Place some stickers that let people know you have wifi enabled. If people don’t know, all this is pointless.

It’s important to remember how many pros are there in buying previous rev gadgets.
It often happens that the latest version of thing hold the price of the last, and so, previous revs are really cheaper.
In actual consumer electronics, if you can settle with old gadget instead of the shiny new one, you’ll save more than a pair of bucks.
Actually, you probably won’t notice the difference until the new revision of the gadget in question is out.

Frequently, the people that comes to me with the question of what laptop/mobile/pmp (gadget) to buy often seek some kind of help instead of direct and specific advice.
Sometimes I feel the other person is somewhat afraid. Luckily, the fear of making a mistake with a purchase is not that difficult to get rid of. You just have to answer yourself what is it that you want the gadget for and how much are you willing to spend.
However this pointers might help.

1. Draw a line around your needs. The last camera phone will make everyone look shabby, but not many businesses can take advantage of it.
2. Read online reviews. There are really good reviews, and if you’re considering buying this or that why not taking a look to what other people think of it. Some times this point is critical.
3. Define what you would settle with. This is key (most of all when budget is not large, and it never is). You’re buying something, that thing has to make things better. And there is a minimum to how many things. Make sure you are buying something that covers all your critical issues, if not, your fear to make a mistake has just came to reality.

You can add as many items as you like. The bottom line is that if you have a system for buying technology it becomes much less scarier.