Posts Tagged ‘Laptop’

Some good ideas on getting that home office space organized

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

An organized home office will make for a faster and more pleasant workday. Here are a few thoughts to get you and your home office organized.

Do you have a home office? You don’t necessarily need an entire room, but you should have a well-defined space to contain all your office accessories and files. A desk in your bedroom that will hold your files, paper, pens, calculator and of course laptop will do just fine, especially in the beginning. If your office consists of the dinner room table, some of the drawers in your kitchen, a file cabinet in the basement and the computer in the bedroom, you may want to think organizing everything in one spot.

Are you wasting a lot of time looking for a specific article, running from place to place to locate it? Think about moving all your records and documents to one central location, preferably by to the laptop if that is where you are doing the majority of your work.

Store your personal files and papers separate from your business things.

You will eventually have enough paperwork to deal with without having your personal bills, magazines and the kids after-school schedule mixed in there. Create a separate location for them somewhere outside of your home office space.

Establish a file system that works for you. Remember, you may be working for someone else, but when it comes to your home office, you are your own boss.

Take a good look at your work area. Do you have piles of documents, files, mail, floppy discs and CDs lying around? Do you see anything else piling up? Set aside a few hours and put the whole thing away. Make use of your new file system and find a place for everything else too.

Now that you have your office sorted out, set aside a few minutes at the end of your workday to keep it that way. Try to leave work for the day with a neat, clear desk. You will be glad about it the next morning. This will also put a stop to you from ever coming across a enormous pile of papers ever again.

Let’s talk about the documents on your computer. You can squander just as much time looking for an online record as for a piece of paper. If your laptop is needed for work as well as for personal use, create a work folder and use subfolders for particular employers, projects etc.

Again, create with a file system that works for you and store your work files away from your personal files. This is especially imperative if other family members access the computer also. If that’s the case, and you are using Windows XP, I strongly advocate setting up a separate user account just for work and password protecting it. This will prevent other family members from unintentionally altering or deleting your work records. Find more information on bed linen there

In addition to your ordinary files, you also want to keep your emails cleaned up. Let’s be truthful, we have all wasted time hunting for a specific email that contained some critical info we required fast. Setting up folders for various clients and projects has worked well for me, but once again find a system that works for you and stay with it. Sort the email as soon as you read it. It only takes a second or two to drop it in the right folder, but will save you a lot of time if you have to find it afterward.Visit for other info about kids bedding

I encourage you to start with a few of these pointers to get your office and yourself more sorted out. You will be amazed by how much time you will save not looking for files, papers or the stapler. Before long, you won’t know how you ever made it though the day without an organized home office.See other great information on blankets there

Disclaimer: This posting is based on freely available info in the popular press and medical journals that deal with organizing your home. Nothing you’ve read here is intended to be or should be perceived to be any sort of medical advice. For medical advice the visitor needs to consult with their physician or other medical specialist.

Small Laptops Pack a Big Punch

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Small laptops allow students the chance to work on their latest essays away from their desk. Small laptops are ideal to take into lectures. Small laptops are easy to carry, lightweight, and have become more and more user friendly. Often referred to as netbooks, web books, or mini laptops they are fast becoming the latest must have item.

Small laptops also are cheaper than most of the regular notebooks. Netbooks are low-cost portable PCs whose main purpose is to access the Web. They generally aren’t meant for multitasking or handling jobs like advanced photo editing. Small laptops are small in size. They usually have a screen of about 10 to 11 inches.

Typically, small laptops use low-power WiFi and low-contrast displays to prolong their battery life. For the same reason, they also use a powered-down version of common CPUs. Typically the traditional laptop equation is that the smaller you get, the more expensive. This breaks that trend completely. Typical netbook’s are still in the 8-16GB range, while harddisks are up to 160GB. This is a big punch in a small package and allows for the vast majority of day to day computer use.

Many small laptops also come with all the software and accessories you need to get the job done. All are preloaded with the operating system and usually weigh about 2 pounds. Most small laptops include WiFi, 3 USB ports, have a built-in card reader, speakers, and microphone. If they’ll be taking it with them, small laptops is an essential consideration.

My Mini Dell Experience

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

That’s the experience with the Inspiron 910 Mini not the mini-experience! Well I am in web development and have been toying with the idea of getting a more portable laptop as my old Dell Inspiron from 2003 is as heavy as a brick. My step dad just bought a top of the range Toshiba Portege at around £1,200, but he’s at that time in life where 1,200 quid is affordable, where as I’m still in financial recovery from my last divorce (yes there was more than one!)! So I happened across the Dell Inspiron 910 Mini on the Dell website whilst looking at specs of normal laptops to use when out and about demonstrating our CMS system to potential clients, wow £299 inc VAT and delivery that is a bargain!

There I was credit card at the ready, wrist twitching, hang on I thought, why am I buying this, do I really need it? No, I don’t NEED it I just HAVE TO HAVE ONE . [Puts credit card away]

The next day I happen to have to work on my step Dads’ ultra lightweight new laptop, wow this is lush, so light, I wish I could afford one.

The next day I had to go to a clients with my laptop, and about put my back out trying to put it in the car passenger foot well whilst sitting in the drivers’ seat, hmm decided I do have a NEED for the new dell Inspiron mini after all! It only weights around 1kg. So as I had a management meeting that afternoon I informed my finance manager I would be ordering one and that was that. So Friday October 3rd I placed the order on the Dell website, and on the 8th I got back from a client meeting at Softcat the Mimecast resellers to find a Dell cardboard box on my desk, I thought it couldn’t possibly be the new mini as the confirmation email I got said it would arrive on or around the 20th October, but sure enough it really had arrived.

Well I was ecstatic and got it out and started setting it up straight away, you know remove McAfee Security Centre and install Avast Anti Virus, that kind of thing. As it has an integrated web cam I also downloaded Windows Live Messenger and had a quick video chat with my girlfriend whilst she was doing her ironing, fantastic!

So I googled ‘mobile broadband suppliers’ and toyed with ordering the USB dongle from Three, as their 5GB monthly allowance is only 15 quid a month so the best looking deal, providing those coverage stories you hear about Three Mobile are not really true!

Anyway, it was soon time to go and get my daughter from school so I thought yeah I’ll take it with me and even though I don’t have the mobile broadband USB Modem yet I can continue configuring it in car park if I’m early. I was early, so I turned it on, it said:

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report this problem as :
load needed DLLs for kernel.
Please contact your support person to report this problem

As we say in England “Computer says no…”

Ah dear, it was great fun whilst it lasted, then followed a 2 and a half hour telethon with Dell support in India :-) Apparently they were so quick to ship it to me that my service tag isn’t on their system yet. They suggested I called back in 24-48 hours, well I told them exactly what I thought of their suggestion as I’m sure you can image, but to no avail. I did indeed have to call back today and they have agreed to send me a replacement unit as it is within 7 days of delivery.

I hope the replacement arrives as quickly as the original unit did…

So conclusion? Apart from the fact it doesn’t work (a faulty drive in my opinion) and for the life of me I can’t get it to boot from an external drive or USB key (it doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive you know) it feels really solid, looks lovely, and is nice to handle (sounds a bit like the ideal partner to an i-phone 2.0 doesn’t it!).

Like most reviewers have stated , the keys are small (but blackberry users manage and they are larger than those keys) and the right shift key is tiny and means you can’t type an @ in the usual fashion and I wonder how it’s going to cope with all the complicated keyboard stuff I have to do whilst running my cms content management system company when I’m out on the road. The screen is nice though, 3 USB slots, a monitor connector, Ethernet and earphones and mic connectors although it has both speakers and mic internally so you can video conference and both speak and listen through the inbuilt hardware without having to plug anything in.

On the whole, I would recommend it, providing you get one that isn’t broken ! I am also yet to try it with LogMeIn which is my preferred way of dealing with how to access emails, lots of passwords, specialist software and all that kind of thing when you are out and about. Possibly the screen is going to be too small to be able to work with for extended periods of time, but I’ll let you know when the replacement arrives and I have had chance to give it a proper testing, assuming that one doesn’t break on me as soon as I start urm ‘configuring’ it!