Press

To accompany our recent coverage of the BASDA Green IT Charter, we present some suggestions for greener use of technology from Business IT Guide.

1. Install Local Cooling, a freeware application that lowers your computer's power consumption and allows you to customise the amount of power you want to save. It tells you how much KWh you save and even the equivalent of trees.

Four home working essentials

1. A stable broadband internet line: This is the most important item you need as a home worker. Video conferences will not stutter, file transfers will be zippy, and your productivity will not suffer.

This Business IT Guide is designed to assist you in building a knowledge base to store important business specific knowledge in a systematic way.

The improved performance, capacity and functionality that a new computer delivers more than outweigh the potential saving that can be made by upgrading your current computer.

New Intel processors are typically twice as fast as they were 18 months ago.Furthermore, you will save more through reduced power costs, as new computers are greener and more efficient than models over two years old doing twice the work, but consuming half the power.

Finally, the reality is that older upgrades can often work out to be more expensive than the latest models.

The cost of printing documents has made many businesses consider what, when and how they are using printing facilities. This guide will help you buy a printer to suit your business.

Despite moves towards a paperless office, every business needs to print out some form of documentation. Even though fewer letters may be being sent, comanies still need to print invoices, reports, documents and occasionally emails.

Simple and short are best when it comes to reports, according to the advice in our latest technology tips from Business IT Guides.

1. Use colour sparingly: A report is about content, so bear this in mind. Use colour to enhance the report but remember that the presentation will be a distant memory if it is not well written.

Time and again, press reports write about the dangers of sensitive data going missing. This Business IT Guide takes you through the basic steps to secure data on your laptop and other devices from prying eyes.

A lot of small business data is private and confidential. For example imagine if your customer list or prospect data went missing and ended up with a competitor - your business could suffer a lot of harm.

One of a series of regular tips and guides on technology topics from Business IT Guides.

This extract is the first of several from the Business IT Guide to alert AccountingWEB members to the range of technology advice available from this government-sponsored site. It outlines the key benefits of sharing and collaborating on documents electronically and points the way steps to implementing a solution.