Unboxing Tonight!

The HP 2133 Mini is "out for delivery". Watch for a post tomorrow on my initial thoughts about the device and the prospect of living the next month "in the cloud".

Netbook and Cloud Test ...

I am looking forward to an "exciting" October. On Tuesday, September 30, I am supposed to receiving a new HP 2133 Mini. I will be detailing the specifics of the device, plus offering some "unboxing" photos late Tuesday or early Wednesday. For now, suffice it to say I ordered a model equipped with Linux (openSUSE). I am going to begin a month long test to see if I can work exclusively* with the Netbook and Cloud based applications. I am doing this primarily to get prepared to assist a client who is interested in this configuration for his small business. In addition, I believe this is the future direction that may individuals as well as small businesses, especially those who are mobile, will be headed in the next few years.

Why the HP instead of one of the many other Netbooks now available? Three primary reasons:

1. Price ... $100.00 Rebate until September 30
2. Keyboard ... 92% full-size, including a full-size left shift key
3. Express Slot ... Only the Lenovo S10 and HP Mini have an Express Slot

Plus, in my opinion, the build of the HP is superior to all of the other Netbooks, bar none. My goal is to publish a daily update throughout October. Stay tuned ...

*In all honesty, I will probably continue to use my desktop PC for photo work. Hopefully, as the month progresses, I will have enough time and experience to begin migrating photo work to the Netbook as well.

The Paperless Office ...

Since about 2000, I have been working with businesses who wanted to "go paperless". Since then I have developed a decent level of expertise with the processes, hardware, and software needed to prepare, scan, file, retrieve, and maintain paper documents. In fact, one of the businesses I worked with achieved total paperlessness, but there were so many complaints we finally put paper back in the bathrooms. (That is a joke! Ha, Ha)

But going paperless is tough for most of us. There is a certain level of "comfort" having a piece of paper that you can toss in your briefcase and read when you are away from your computer. It is really easy, say, to print all of your e-mail before leaving for a trip to read on the plane or even in bed in your hotel before dropping of to sleep.

PC Magazine recently published an article titled Three Steps to the Paperless Office. Here are some excerpts:

1. Think Before You Ink. The change has to start here. We all have to change how we look at paper. Before you print out anything, ask yourself if it is absolutely necessary. If you have a digital copy of that e-mail, why do you need a printed version? The green blog TreeHugger.com tried to build an eco-meme by asking people to add this line to their e-mail signatures: "Eco-Tip: Printing e-mails is usually a waste." Sure, it is a little preachy, but sometimes we need preachers to show us the way. We all probably send too much e-mail, but printing them out is downright sinful.

2. Preview Your Documents. The average employee prints six totally useless pages per day. All you have to do is walk over to the network printer in your office to see examples of them. You will usually find a tray filled with blank pages, misplaced spreadsheet fields, and random HTML fields from printed web pages. The average employee prints 1,410 of these wasted pages per year. And this problem is easy to fix: Just preview it first. The easiest way to do this is to use the print preview feature in whatever software you are using to print.

GreenPrint is a software package that automates the process. You can download a free version of GreenPrint from www.printgreener.com; an ad-free version is available for $35. GreenPrint Technologies claims that the average user of the package will save about $90 a year in paper and ink costs. This is a great feature that should become the default in both personal and office printers.

3. Print to PDF. It took a while, but PDF truly is a universal portable document format. And just attaching a Word doc to an e-mail is pretty universal too. Send digital files whenever you can.

There are more ways to cut back, of course, including printing on both sides of pages, electronic invoicing, and using multifunction devices to scan rather than copy, but those three steps alone could put a huge dent in paper waste. These changes won't take place overnight, but we have to look at those stacks of unused, underused, or never reused paper as the inexcusable waste that they are.

As you think about what you can do to minimize waste and become more "green", try these three steps. In the coming weeks watch for more posts about going paperless, including some inexpensive tools - both hardware and software - that may be just what you have been looking for to help you get started on your journey toward The Paperless Office.

Google Notebook ...

A lot of people have a Gmail account, but don't know about many of the other great services offered by Google. Your Gmail account is actually a Google account, meaning you automatically have access to Google Apps (Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations), Calendar, and Notebook, the subject of this post. Google Notebook is an indispensable tool if you frequently search the Internet for information. With Notebook you can:

• Clip useful information.
  You can add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.
  
  
• Organize your notes.
  You can create multiple notebooks, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organized.
  
  
• Get access from anywhere.
  You can access your Google Notebooks from any computer by using your Google Accounts login.
  
  
• Publish your notebook.
  You can share your Google Notebook with the world by making it public.

For a quick tour, click HERE and and take a look. I think you will like what you see and you will use it often.

Backup Solutions ...

There is a saying in IT organizations that nobody cares about backups - they only care about restores! Boy is that ever true. I am not going to belabor the importance of backups (or restores). I just want to give you some up-to-date information on several tools you can use to backup your data on an individual computer. If you have a Small Business with a server, there are other techniques and hardware that would better meet your needs. I will address some solutions for Small Businesses in a future post.

There are a number of products geared toward home/home-office backups. Rebit's Rebit, Seagate Technology's FreeAgent Pro and Maxtor OneTouch 4, and Western Digital's WD Passport, to name just a few, come with external hard drives of various sizes coupled with some type of backup software. All of these products but one require some kind of setup and restore process. The only setup Rebit requires is to plug in a USB cable; no installation, configuration, scheduling or managing is needed. In other words, plug it in and forget it.

Rebit backs up everything on your C drive: the OS, applications, and data. It is tightly integrated with Windows and has a very intuitive Explorer-like drag-and-drop recovery interface; other products have proprietary user interfaces. Rebit uses continuous data protection technology to back up all changes and even provides bare-metal recovery to restore everything from a particular point in time. Rebit routinely purges old files from the disk, so there's always room for new data.

The next edition of Rebit, which should be out this month or next, adds lots of useful features, such as data migration to another PC, file deduplication and Vista support, and partitions so that two PCs can use the same Rebit backup disk. Prices start at $169 for an 80GB disk and climb to $269 for a 500GB model.

I am quite excited about Rebit. If you are in the market for a backup solution, head over to the Rebit site and see what you think.

IDrive ...

Looking for a good, reliable, and easy to use Cloud back-up site? Take a look at IDrive. You get 2GB of free storage. The controls are easy to use and, in my opinion, better than Mozy. Let me know what you think.

ClearView Web Site Now Active ...

The ClearView Services web site is now active! During the next several weeks information about the ClearView group of companies will be added to the site. Take a look and let me know what you think. The URL is www.cvUtah.com.