LANcom Technology Blog

If you need your laptop battery to last as long as possible there are a few things you can do.

1. Reduce the brightness of the screen. If you reduce to brightness of your screen to lowest readable level it will save you some battery power.
2. Put your computer to sleep whenever you are not actively using it. Whenever you step away from your laptop you can set it to sleep or suspend. Once you return a move of the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard will activate your computer again. If you plan to be away for more than an hour you can set your laptop to hibernate which is slower to activate but saves more power than sleep mode and saves the contents of RAM to your hard disk before shutting down meaning you don’t risk losing any work.
3. Make sure your battery is completely flat before recharging. While charging before the battery is completely flat does not have as big of an effect on newer laptops as it does on older ones it still does reduce the batteries performance.
4. When you get a new battery, charge and drain it three times. This fully activates the batteries chemicals ensuring they will last for the maximum amount of time.

Click here to visit HP’s website for more information.

Want to quickly and easily speed up accessing your most used programs? Try adding them to the Quick Launch tool bar. Quick launch is the tool bar displaying icons next to your Start Button.

To add a program to Quick Launch simply click and drag a short cut icon of the program to the place on Quick Launch you would like it to appear.

If your Quick Launch tool bar is not visible then right click on the task bar and select Properties make sure the Lock the task bar box is un-ticked and then tick the Show Quick Launch box.

For more tips on how to customise your computer click here.

As you may have heard, the New Zealand’s daylight-savings period is changing. This year DLT will start one week earlier, from the 30th of September, and end two weeks later.

As you have probably noticed your computer automatically changes the time to fit in with daylight-savings. This change to the daylight-savings schedule will not only mean that your computers clock will be out but will affect all time-dependent software such as Outlook.

Microsoft is providing free patches and updates to all its currently supported applications and operating systems. But users of unsupported products such as Windows 2000 could face charges for the fixes.

More information on this topic can be found at www.microsoft.co.nz/timezone

If you have concerns about any time critical, non Microsoft software, you may want to contact your software provider to confirm that these changes have been catered for.

Dilanka Arewgoda is now CompTIA Linux+ certified. This certification shows competency to perform Linux fundamental command-line administration, manage user accounts and handle file permissions, software configurations and security issues. Well done Dilanka!

Want to keep an eye on emerging business ideas? www.changethis.com is a website that releases manifestoes (a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts) as short PDF documents which anyone can download, print or email to others.

Some of the most talked about manifestoes available include ‘How To Be Creative‘ by Huge Macleod, ‘The Bootstrappers Bible’ by Seth Godin, ‘The Word on Word of Mouth’ by Dave Balter, and ‘The Art of the Start’ by Guy Kawasaki.

Click here to see the other most talked about manifestoes from ChangeThis.

LANcom is about to become a Citrix solution provider - silver partner. This means we can now offer certified Citrix support to our existing and future customers.

This is an area we wanted to move into because as our clients grow there comes a point at which Citrix systems become more cost effective. We currently already have clients using Citrix and believe we will have more in the future.

As we mentioned on this blog earlier, we are soon to release a new report ‘Things to know when buying a server’. But how you know when you need a new server. Microsoft has an article available on their website detailing eight signs that your server needs upgrading. Here is a quick summery.

1. It crawls – If your server is getting slow take a look at you CPU (central processing unit) usage, if it’s approaching 80% it is time to start looking for a new server.
2. It takes up too much time - Are you spending more time on dealing with server problems than you are willing to commit?
3. It’s noisy - As fan drives and hard drives age, they can become noisier. If this is happening to your server it could mean hardware failure is just around the corner.
4. It’s out of warranty – Click here to find out why an out of warranty server is always a bad idea
5. Something doesn’t feel right – For example it takes longer and longer to do the same function.
   
6. There is no more room – Does the requirements of the software you want to run exceed the servers specifications?
   
7. Its performance is otherwise impaired - Does your server seize up often? This could mean that the server is running up against the limits of its performance.
8. The big one happens - A catastrophic failure occurs

To see the full version of this article click here. If you would like to pre- order a copy of our free report ‘Things to know when buying a server’ please email us at info@lancom.co.nz.

We recently received a question on this blog regarding what could be done to speed up Windows 2000 or Windows XP computers (view question). So we have put together a quick list of a few things you could consider.

1. You could increase the RAM of the machine, if it is possible to do.
   
2. You could do a disk cleanup. To run XP you should have around 25% free disk space. If you do not have enough then doing a disk clean up could improve the speed of your machine. Click here for instructions.
3. You could ask your IT supplier for a tune up. If you are a LANcom 770 client all you need to do is let us know that your computer is running slow and we will look into this for you.
4. Finally you need to consider whether or not your computer needs replacing. Generally speaking the useful lifetime of a computer is 3-4 years. If your computer is older than 4 years and is running slowly you should start to look toward replacing it.

For some slightly more technical ways of speeding your Windows XP machine click here.

Have you got any questions or comments? We would love to hear them. To ask a question or leave a comment click on the title of this post.

Thinking of buying a new server? Not sure about what is involved?

We here at LANcom Technology have a deep understanding of all the considerations that have to go into the purchasing of a new server and while we are more than happy to help those purchasing servers through LANcom with this decision we understand that you may like to make this decision internally.

So in keeping with this we have put together this free report to help anyone interested in purchasing a server avoid the pitfalls of this complicated decision. This report is designed to give you a brief overview of all the points you need to consider.

This report is nearing completion and will be available shortly. Our other free information reports include: Introduction to internet based marketing, How does your computer support measure up, Internet security explained, and Remote working for your business. To download any of these from our website click here (registration required). Or alternatively you can contact us at info@lancom.co.nz and we can mail you out a copy.

Want to customise your Internet Explorer so that it makes browsing the internet easy for you? The Microsoft website has links to a number of add-ons that work with IE7.

One that I use is Inline Search. This is a bar that appears at the bottom of your screen that allows you to easy search for a work or phase within the text of the page. What I find to be particularly useful about this add-on is its search while you type feature, which means in most cases you don’t even have to finish typing before it finds what you are looking for.

This same feature is already built into Firefox and can be found by going to Edit then Find on this page.

To download the Inline Search add-on click here. Once you have installed this press Ctrl+f to make the bar appear.

To see the other add-ons available to IE7 click here.