LANcom Technology Blog

Here are a number of keyboard shortcuts you can use involving the Windows Key (Situated between the Ctrl and Alt keys), which might just save you some time.

All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, and MSN Search are known as crawler-based search engines and there are three main parts to these. The spider, the index, and the search engine software.

• First the spider ‘crawls’ the web, reading pages and following the links on them to other pages. The spider will revisited sites on a regular basis to keep up with any changes that are made.
• Second all the web pages the spider discovers are indexed.
• Third when a person uses that search engine it applies search engine software to the index to rank all the indexed pages in order of what it considers to be the most relevant. The algorithm used in search engine software to determine this rank varies between different search engines, that’s why different search engines turn up different results.

Given the nature of how search engines find webpages, if your website has no in- bound links (that’s links from other websites to yours) your website may not turn up in search engine results. If you are having this problem you may like to consider submitting your site to be indexed. Here are the links to some of the major search engines submission pages.

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/

Yahoo - http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

AltraVista - http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/default

MSN Search - http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Microsoft has an article on their website discussing this issue. To sum it up, it doesn’t really matter so long as your computer is set to hibernate after a reasonable amount of time. If your computer is not set to hibernate then leaving it on means it is costing you in power. To do this go to the Start menu and click Control Panel, then Power Options, then under System hibernates: select After 45 mins or which ever setting is best for you.

If you would rather turn it off but are concerned that frequently turning your computer on and off will wear it out you needn’t worry. Today computers are can handle 40,000 on off cycles, which is a number you are not likely to reach in the computers expected useful lifetime (5-7 years).

To view the Microsoft article click here.

According to Microsoft the Linux kernel violates 42 of Microsoft’s patents, while the Linux’s graphical interface violates 65, OpenOffice infringes 45, open-source email programmes infringe 15, and other open-source programs, 68. However Microsoft refusal to admit specifically which patents have been violated has sceptics doubting the strength of their case.

At this stage it doesn’t appear that Microsoft is about to sue anyone. One reason for this being that many users of free or open source software (FOSS) are companies that are also important customers of Microsoft. In any case this is an issue that businesses using FOSS may need to keep an eye on. What Microsoft wants is royalties, and if they get their way there could be big implications for these businesses.

Click here for more information.

Here at LANcom we are in the process of compiling an “Introduction to internet based marketing” free information report and we though you might like a sneak peak. So here is the section on email marketing.

Email marketing is a technique that can be used to both build a relationship with prospects and customers as well as building the traffic to your website.

The best way to get people to opt in to receiving email marketing from you is to offer them something of value. One example of a company that has successfully done this is the Borders book store. Sign up to receive their newsletter and you will be sent a link to a site detailing their products, but also providing you with coupons. These coupons change with each newsletter to maintain the customer’s interest. So one month they may be 20% off all full priced fiction and the next month 15% of all full priced DVDs.

You do not always need to offer discounts. In fact depending on your situation it may not be appropriate. What we do here at LANcom in our email marketing is offer useful information. We have a weekly Microsoft Office Secrets newsletter as well as a monthly newsletter containing IT information that may be of interest to New Zealand businesses as well as any LANcom news. If you are interested in checking these out please contact us at info@lancom.co.nz or 09 377 8282 ext 112.

If you are specifically trying to build traffic to your site you can make the incentive that you offer available on your website and then just point those you are emailing to it.

As well as email marketing being a way to generate traffic to your website, your website can also be used to get people to opt-in to your email marketing. If you have ever visited out website www.lancom.co.nz you may have seen that here you can sign up to our free reports and email newsletters by registering your contact information.

The Disk Cleanup tool can help free up space on your hard disk improving the performance of you computer. It identifies which files can be safely deleted, and then lets you choose which of those you would like to delete such as temporary internet files, Windows temporary files, Windows components that you don’t use etc.

• To do a disk cleanup click Start, then go to All Programmes, Accessories, System tools, and click Disk Cleanup. It may take a few minutes while it calculates how much space it is able to free.

• Now look through the Files to delete list.
• Un-tick the boxes of any files you do not want to be deleted and then click Ok and Yes.

Interested in finding out when someone blogs about your company? Or the competition? You can using Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a free service that alerts you by email of the top results for your selected search terms. You can subscribe to alerts from News, the Web, blogs, groups, or all four. So if you would like to know when someone mentions your company name in a blog all you need to do is sign up for a blogs alert with your company name as the search term. When selecting how often you would like to receive alerts select “As it happens”. Then Google will continuously check blog search results and email you as soon as there is a new result.

According to Google some of the other uses for this service are monitoring a developing news story or tracking medical advances.

For more information click here to visit Google Alerts FAQ

If you are interested in learning more about software and technology HP has free, instructor lead online courses on a number of topics. One of the most popular classes is Microsoft Windows XP 201: basic customisation, which has 6 online lessons including, Change how Microsoft Windows looks and feels and Cool things you can do with Microsoft Windows XP. Registration and enrolment is required.

If you would like to see the full range of software and technology classes available click here.

Here is a link to an article on how Business 2.0, a technology conscious business magazine, who has reminded readers about the importance of backups in the past failed to notice that their own backup server was not backing up. On the 23^rd of April their editorial system crashed causing them to lose all that had been done on their June issue. Luckily they still had a copy of the text version as this had been emailed to their lawyers.