Is your office equipment letting you down?

[tec0]

I take it that your system is network based. Remote Administrator is a capability of Windows XP pro and only the more Powerful Vista OS like Ultimate. With this tool you can log into the other computers and send the information to you by taking control of the system. It is easy to set-up and runs OK on a network.

Remote Administrator can work here, all you do is you share a temporary folder and log into the computers and start the copy process on the network. After you are done you just log out of the computer and log into the next. But there is a much easier way to this.

Here is a brainwave you can try. Set up a folder for each user on your server. Map the folder to their desktop and let them work from it. Give them an ID code along with the file name.

Example: file name 01 (Identify the user with the 01) and if someone edit the document let them put their number in place of the 01. So user one is 01 user two is 02. Thus the document will be saved as document01.doc by user 1 and document02.doc for user two thus you don’t get everyone working on the same document all the time! Only if they need to they can correspond with the file in question.

Now everything will be opened and saved onto the server ALL THE TIME thus you only need to back up the drive with the folders on them. “this is really primitive but it works” I know of two small companies that work this way “they don’t want to spend the money for a proper server system” It works okay but take care this can become tricky! Trust me it can become a nightmare if you lose sight of it!

[Marq]

Thanks for the input guys.

I can see I will have to take a day off and play with these ideas and processes.
It will be a day that I will take a prozac, suck on magic mushrooms, smoke a spliff and do calming meditation exercises.

[twinscythe12332]

I've just taken a quick look at the MS vista backup setup. It seems a little bit... silly, focusing on types of files rather than allowing the user to specify the FOLDERS they want to back up, but hey, that's Microsoft. Anyway here's a look at the vista backup settings.
Part one shows the files you can save in the backup, and part two is specifying the times, days, frequency of the backup. The screen before all of this allows you to specify that you wish to backup to a particular external device or network PC. Useful in your case I'd say.

As for XP, I'm thinking there will be similar options, but maybe not quite as pretty a process. I'll take a look at it once I'm homeward.

[IanF]

Toner costs

Here is my take on toner costs. The higher the price of the printer the lower the cost of the toner. I print to my copiers all day and get charged a "click" charge for each print which includes the toner and the service. I have just had the tech for my colour machine in here for 2 days to get the machine working properly this hasn't cost me any more.
So if you do a reasonable amount of printing get a copier you can print to, just make sure that the company has a good reputation for service. If you get a mono machine insist that the used toner is not recirculated, this recycles a lot of paper dust giving you grey prints. Don't lease from the copier company and if you lease, do it through your bank the maximum term should be 3 years. Also pay a bit extra for scan back facilities, for me this is a nice little profit centre.
What I have done for USB ports is to get the USB extension cords so the USB port is right next to the keyboard, worth the few bucks for the convenience.

[tec0]

I dislike USB hubs. The reason is power. Think about this everything you connect to the USB hub takes an amount of power. Now all that power comes from the computer’s USB port because most USB hubs don’t have their own power-supply! Now I promise you your port on your computer will make trouble within 12 months if the use is constant. The alternative is a USB expansion card; use this with your USB hub. The reason is simple once the card becomes faulty you can replace it.