Archive for July, 2006

by Justin French, Perfect Integration - Small Business Computer Consultants

Implementing these tips will help prolong the life of your computer

Like most people, I bet you’re pretty careful about maintaining your car. You change the oil every 3,000 miles, fill up your gas tank when it’s down to one- quarter full, and bring your car to the dealership every 7,500 miles for a thorough tune-up.

Yet if you’re like most small businesses, you do absolutely nothing to maintain your PC until the bloody thing crashes. “Most computer crashes are the result of very silly things that can be prevented,” says one small business owner in Carlsbad CA. “If I buy a computer the same day as you, and it is exactly the same computer, and we both utilize it for a period of one year, and I conduct the 8 steps and you do not, my PC will run more efficiently, and I will be twice as productive - GUARANTEED, says French”

Here’s a checklist of eight things you should frequently do to maintain your PC. I strongly recommend you print out this column and tape it on your computer monitor where you can see it every day. Note: The following applies only to PCs using Microsoft Windows operating systems.

1. Delete your deleted items. If you use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express as your e-mail program, you have two folders called “Sent Items” and “Deleted Items.” The “Deleted Items” folder contains copies of all e-mail messages you’ve deleted from your Inbox, while the “Sent Items” folder contains copies of all e-mail messages you’ve sent or forwarded. You should go through these files every week, save the ones you absolutely need, and delete the rest. French says he recently worked with a client who had more than 10,000 messages in these folders and couldn’t understand why his PC was operating so slowly.

2. Toss your cookies. Your PC keeps copies of every Web page you’ve ever viewed in a “Temporary Internet Files” folder, while a separate “Cookies” folder contains programs that help marketers track you down. You don’t need these files, and they can take up an awful lot of space. Delete them weekly.

3. Delete your “Temp” files. These are files that end in “.tmp” that French says can easily be found by searching your computer for “*.tmp.” Also delete them weekly.

4. Reboot your computer frequently. Most people start their PCs in the morning and keep them on all day (and sometimes all night). French says most problems can be solved from re-booting. Rebooting your PC at the beginning and in the middle of the day will recover system resources so the computer will work more efficiently sometimes.

5. Defrag, defrag, defrag. When your PC puts stuff onto the hard drive, it does it in random sequence. As a result, you often end up with little bits and pieces of programs scattered throughout your computer’s hard drive. While usually harmless, French says these bits and pieces “can be a little bit like space debris; they’re small and widely scattered, but if one gets in the way while you’re downloading a new program, there can be trouble.” Your PC has a “defrag” (short for “defragmenting”) program that organizes all these pieces of data. French says you should use it at least once a month, “more often if you’re running low on free disk space,” but points out that if you have less than 25 percent of your hard drive free, it may be difficult to defrag the drive. Warning: If you haven’t “defragged” in a while, running this program can take a few hours.

6. Run ScanDisk. You should run Windows’ “ScanDisk” program at least once a month. “ScanDisk is extremely thorough,” says French, “because it looks at every single file on your computer’s hard drive, decides if it’s necessary, finds a place for it if it is necessary, and deletes it if it isn’t.” French warns that running ScanDisk in “Thorough” mode can take several hours. “I tell clients who haven’t used ScanDisk in a long time to run it right before they go to bed; the program will usually be finished by the morning,” says French.

7. Dust. Finally, French says you should eliminate as much dust as possible from your computer. At least twice a year, you should:

• dust and vacuum your computer keyboard and monitor;
• remove the trackball from your mouse and blow out any dust

“Dirt and dust tend to make the computer’s temperature rise, which can damage the processor. Dirt can also create short circuits, especially in the power supply.”

8. Don’t forget to do your Windows Updates! Microsoft Windows software lets users know in the lower right-hand corner of the desktop when new updates are available for installation. You should stay on top of these. These are critical updates from Microsoft that fixes vulnerabilities that are discovered on a regular basis from their engineers.

Perfect Integration offers Scheduled maintenance of the 8 steps for a reasonable cost for small businesses that want to focus more on their business and less on their PCs!

Request our FREE REPORT on how to cut computer service costs by 25% and increase productivity in your business by 25% in the first year!

One of management’s key responsibilities is selecting the right people to perform the functions needed by the business to operate productively. Hiring the wrong person can affect your business for years. Businesses have even been found legally liable for damages to property and injury to customers as a result of employee incompetence because they failed to uncover the candidate’s depth of ignorance at the time of hiring.

Whether you’re about to hire your first team member or you’ve already hired dozens, there are some basic steps to the process that you need to keep in mind.

Step 1. Know exactly what you’re looking for before you start looking

The first thing to do is to clearly define the person you’re looking for in terms of their education, skills and competencies required to perform the job. But it needs to go much further than that. You also need to clearly set out the type of person you need to help you achieve the vision you have for your business. Qualities like friendliness, integrity and enthusiasm are important in a smaller enterprise.

Step 2. Consider how you’re going to find them

How you go about getting the word out about your position goes a long way toward determining the quality of the candidates you’ll get applications from. You can advertise directly, which means you get to do all the qualifying and screening yourself. Or, you can use an outside source such as a government placement service or a fee-based recruitment agency. Don’t rush into this decision. Identify your options and talk with someone from each agency you could use. You’ll get a lot of good ideas doing this and eventually find the agency with access to the biggest pool of quality prospects.

Step 3. Plan your interview process carefully

The attributes you chose in step 1 will now become the basis of your interview questions. Many of these issues are easily turned into questions, for example about their education, background and work experience. Others, such as their degree of enthusiasm, are subjective and require your own assessment.

Ask at least a few open ended questions to extract the candidate’s feelings on particular subjects. Get their ‘take’ on important areas like their attitude toward customer service and their relationship with co-workers and supervisors. Give them some ‘what if’ questions to see how they might behave in certain situations.

Step 4. Thoroughly check their resumes and references
Do thorough background checking on candidates you think might be worth hiring. Even if they’ve made a terrific impression during the interview there may be something lurking in their past that can cause you problems in the future.

A pre-employment investigation is easy to arrange and will quickly tell you if they have any criminal convictions or a history of problems with employers. Contact their former employers and ask them for a reference. They may not be willing to say much, but even their guarded answers may tell you that there’s been some sort of conflict in those previous positions.

You may even consider having an outside testing firm administer standard tests for things like emotional stability and intelligence.

Step 5. Get them up to speed fast

After you’ve appointed the person, a well planned induction will get your relationship off to a good start. This will introduce them to your business, to its culture, and to their workmates. Arrange for any training needed, such as on operating a particular piece of equipment or in the use of the software your company uses, to be conducted soon after they start.

Hiring is really about people and not just a set of skills that any one of several candidates may possess. Dedicate your hiring process to getting the right person in every respect; the future of your company depends on it.

Information in this article is sourced from RAN ONE, Inc

A business plan is a roadmap that sets out your route for the development of your business. It doesn’t tell you just about the current state of the business, its strengths and its weaknesses, it will also show up the opportunities and what needs to be done to stay ahead of the competition.

You might think you know all this now and don’t have to write it down. But what if something happened to you and someone else had to take over the operation? What would they need to know so it was still there and profitable when you returned? This is the kind of information contained in your business plan and its good insurance against the unknown.

It clarifies your objectives What are your goals? These will be in your business plan, the original goals you had plus any additional objectives that arise in the course of business. Your business plan spells out the goals and shows the milestones along the way that tell you how close you are to achieving them. Goals are flexible and can be as varied as achieving a certain level of turnover or simply acquiring new customers. It’s important, however, that each is presented in the same way as a target with milestones or indicators that will let you measure how near you are to achieving it.

It contains your business vision A vision is your description of how the business will look at a specific date usually three or five years from the time the statement is written. This is another part of a business plan that is regularly updated and describes how the business will look from the outside (to customers) and from the inside (to management and staff) when it has achieved the goals that are presently set.

It outlines your company’s mission statement The mission statement is another expression of the businesses’ long term goals. The mission of all businesses is to conduct profitable business of course, but it should also have other intangible goals covering such issues as morality and ethics. How do you want your business to treat its customers? How does your business want to treat its team members? The mission statement is both long term and ongoing - a statement of principles of business conduct and behavior that rests above the metrics of commerce.

Cover all the management essentials Businesses are organic in nature, changing constantly but always with growth in mind. Your business plan is also organic - an ongoing record of the changes in your business as well as a structure for the changes that will take place in the future and their intended consequences. Here are just a few of the many possible elements that can be incorporated into your business plan:

• Your products - The present and planned range of products you sell, together with any product development your firm undertakes to create its own products
• Your management structure - A statement of positions, responsibilities and authorities
• Your finances - How the business is funded and how it will repay its loans, your company’s credit policy and how it will be enforced
• Your marketing plan - How your business will be marketed, the promotional budget, the target market, future plans for expansion, and
• Your succession plan - When you intend to leave the business and how you will realize its maximum value

Every business should have an up-to-date and functional business plan. It will tell you where the business is going and how it’s going to get there. It will focus the efforts of you, your management and the rest of your team on the drivers that will bring you what you want from the business. It is, in other words, a map to the future of your enterprise.

Information in this article is sourced from RAN ONE, Inc