Our Reliable OfficeJet Pro K5400

  We speak to people a lot about the merits of paying up front for a better printer in order to benefit from more cost effective ink costs going forward. So now it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and see how I’ve done on my last printer choice.

We’ve had a HP OfficeJet Pro K5400 Inkjet Printer in the office now for over two years. I must say that it has performed flawlessly for that time. It’s used mainly to letter-headed invoices and customer letters – we use a black laser printer for internal office materials, manuals etc. I noticed this morning that it was needing a new cartridge which prompted me to check on our usage over the two years.

Since we started using the printer, we’ve printed 4,824 sheets of paper of which  4155 were colour. With the OfficeJet Pro being designed for much higher use, we’ve only had to buy a handful of cartridges which has been very convenient. We always buy the extra large (XL) cartridges to save having to order frequently – too many of our customers mention their non-stop trips to buy small ink cartridges. Our cost per page calculation looks like this.

So the headline number is under 6 cents per page. I think that’s not bad for colour pages given that large office colour laser printers are often quoted at nearly double that – for example, take a look at http://www.office.xerox.com/latest/OPBFS-13.PDF 

These prices are based on retail prices of ink. Of course, if you shop around you’ll be able to find a much better price and thereby lower your cost per print.

Another way of looking at this is in terms of cost of ownership, ie how much should the printer cost you over its lifetime. We’ve sold a number of low cost HP All-in-One printers recently, primarily to homes with low use requirements. These printers use the HP 364 cartridge which gives around 250 pages per cartridge or the HP 364XL cartridge which will run for around 800 pages. I took some time to plug the performance numbers for these printers into the same table above and the result was interesting.

Despite the much higher original price of our Inkjet Pro, these numbers say that for our relatively low office use, we’re still €70 better off having paid for the more expensive printer. Given that we’ve benefitted from the much higher performance and more advanced features we well, it seems like a no brainer. The benefit will keep climbing with every page we print.

It’s nice to see that even small businesses can get cost effective printing, as long as they choose their printer carefully.

Ask any iPhone, Android Phone or Mac user and they’ll tell you – there’s instant gratification from going into their App Store and downloading the latest Facebook, Pacman or Sky News App. What’s more it’s often free or cleverly priced low so you don’t even think about it….

Well, now Intel has taken this idea and brought it to Windows. It’s called AppUp. You can find it at www.appup.com.

Thought your PC was safe from Angry Birds, the entertaining, addictive, number one iPhone game? – Not any more, you can get it for your PC now on AppUp, along with countless others such as “Pacman”, “My Little Artist” – a drawing package for kids, and, especially in January “I Need a Budget”.

Once you’ve installed AppUp itself, App installation is a breeze – just click on the App you want and it will download and install automatically. It makes you wonder if all software will soon go this way. It makes it so easy for everyone.

So give it a try, all you have to loose is your disk space

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00

A new survey by iSuppli last week showed that memory prices have dropped to new lows in December. So if your machine has been running a bit slow over the past while or you’d just like to give it a shot in the arm, now might be the right time to invest in more memory.  If your computer is running Windows XP, we would recommend that you have at least 1 GB (Gigabyte) of memory installed. For Windows Vista and Windows 7, 2GB is a more appropriate lower limit. Many modern computers are able to take up to 4GB and some will take much more. However, certain versions of Windows including most installations of Windows XP cannot make full use of 4GB, so it’s not always a case that more is better.

If you want to find out how much memory your machine currently has, click on the Start button, right click on “Computer” or “My Computer” and then click “Properties”. You should get a window that looks something like this (the exact format varies depending on which version of Windows you have).

Installing memory is normally very straight-forward, even on a laptop. So it may well be something you’d be willing to try yourself. If not, we at Home Helptech are happy to install it for you. Installation can cost  as little as €20 so don’t be afraid to give us a call for a quote.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00

Identifying exactly which background processes are causing your system to start up slowly can require quite a bit of technical expertise. Recently, however, we’ve come across a new piece of software which takes much of the effort out of doing the initial analysis. Soluto (www.soluto.com) is a piece of “Anti-Frustration Software” which times how long each start up process takes and, for some of the simpler processes, allows you to turn them off straight away. It’s a great way to give your start-up time a bit of a boost.

The software is still not in it’s final version and we did have one case of a PC in the office crashing after we installed it back in July, so “downloader beware”. Shortly after that crash, it became unavailable for download for a couple of months so we assume they were sorting out that problem.  Now that it’s back, it does hold out the promise of putting a spring in your PCs step so worth a try for some. We love it.

After a long and illustrious (?) career, Microsoft has ended support for Windows 2000 yesterday. Similarly, if you still have Windows XP with Service Pack 2, then now is the day which you really must bow to the inevitable and perform the free upgrade to Service Pack 3. If you remain using Windows 2000 or Windows XP with Service Pack 2, your machine will become increasingly vunerable to attack as Microsoft will no longer issue security updates. 

If you are still running Windows 2000, this really means you’re overdue a new machine. It’s likely that the machine is at least 8 years old and is due to retire.

If you have Windows XP, you can check whether you have Service Pack 3 installed by right clicking on “My Computer” and clicking “Properties”. The window that appears should look like this:

If this window does not show Service Pack 3 then you can either update to it using Windows Update or download it by clicking here.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00

Many people find shopping for a new laptop a bit daunting. Especially when a salesman is talking about gigabytes, megabytes, megahertz, hard drives, memory and so on. So I have composed a list of what you should be getting for your money.

Affordable Laptop price range : €300 -  €500

If your use for the laptop is just for surfing the Internet, checking emails or your Facebook account then this range would be for you. This laptop rage can also be used for the same reasons as the mid-range laptop but you might run into a few problems by installing or running too many programs.

Mid-range Laptop price range: €550 – €900

If you are a user that spends  a lot of time on your laptop for work, college or just pleasure this range would be for you.

High-end Laptop price range: €950 – endless

The type of user that would generally buy a high-end laptop would be Technicians, Engineers, Gamers, Enthusiasts and so on. these would be used to run multiple power hungry programs/games without giving the user problems.

Below will give you a rough idea on what specifications you should be getting for your money. Please note that technology changes every day with something faster and better so this should only be used as a guide line.

Processors:

The processor also known as the Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the brain of the operation, this is where all the programs instructions are executed and carries out all the computers functions. The speed of the processor is measured in Gigahertz which will be seen as GHz. I could go on about how it works but that is not important for now as I do not want to bog you down with information you don’t need. I want to make this as simple as possible. The cache memory is something to keep an eye on for the higher end laptops but usually in PC shops they only advertise the processor speed so we will stick with that for the moment. There are two main companies who design processors out there, AMD and Intel. AMD are the cheapest option but don’t let this fool you, this means you get more bang for your buck but what Intel do they do it well.

Affordable Laptop :

for the affordable laptop I would suggest getting a laptop with an AMD processor. You will get a faster processor for the price of an entry model Intel so keep an eye out for this. I would advise people to stay away from the Intel Celeron range and go for something like an AMD Semphron or even better an AMD Athlon. You should be looking for something like a 1.8GHz to 2.1GHz processor, the higher the better.

Mid-range Laptop :

For this range you should be looking at getting an Intel Core i3 which is around 2.2GHz. For the same price again you could get a laptop with an AMD processor with a 2.7GHz processor such as the Turion II Dual Core. Again it is up to you at the end of the day what you would prefer but both are great processors.

High-End Laptop:

This is where Intel start dominating the market. I would advise on going for an Intel processor for this kind of money. They are powerful and reliable. the processor comes in Dual Core and Quad Core versions which means 2 or 4 processors in one. The new type of Intel chips are now Intel Core i5 and i7. As explained earlier go for a higher cache memory which should be around 4mb or higher.

Next week we will be looking memory …..

If you have a PC, it’s almost certain that you have Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash installed on your PC. Adobe Reader is used to open documents such as the manuals you get with digital camera, printers, MP3 players and pretty much everything else. Adobe Flash is used for webpage animations and for video – for example, you can’t see the video on YouTube and many other websites if you don’t have Adobe Flash installed.

Unfortunately, that fact these two products are so ubiquitous means that they have become a major target for virus and malware creators world wide. On June 6th, Adobe announced that a critical problem had been found with both Reader and Flash which allowed the bad guys to exploit these programs to run other programs of their choosing (click here for more details). The fix to this critical problem has now been released in the past few days and we”d encourage you to get updated as quickly as possible.

Updating Adobe Reader

In order to update Adobe Reader, click on Start -> All Programs and then click Adobe Reader, which is normally near the top of the programs list. Once Adobe Reader has started click on Help and then click on “Check for Updates…” as highlighted by the red ring in the picture below.

Updating Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash should update automatically. To manually update it, you can do the following.

1. Go to http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

2. Click on “Get the Latest Version” and follow the prompts.

We recommend that you don’t delay – do it now – it might save you from a costly virus infection.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00