I love my laptops. I have relatively new a Toshiba consumer model for personal use (like writing this column) and a DELL Latitude D520 at the office. If you use a laptop (particularly a DELL laptop), I highly recommend a docking station and dual-monitors in locations where you spend a large amount of time. My office setup consists of a hardware dock (which means I don’t have to plug and unplug connections to my laptop), a keyboard and optical mouse, and dual 19-inch LCD monitors.
Most modern laptops support dual monitors without any problem. The additional cost of a nicely equipped docking setup —less than $800 ($200 for the dock and less than $300 for each LCD monitor)—is more than offset by the productivity boost of additional screen real estate. If you’re not using dual monitors on your current computer (laptop or desktop), you really should move up to the wide open spaces of multiple monitors. It may seem like decadent luxury, but the productivity increase is enormous for anyone spending more than an hour or two in front of a computer screen each day.
The other thing a docking setup makes easier is attaching a nice, big, external USB drive for backup and extra storage. It’s amazing to me that you can now buy 500 gigabytes of hard drive—half a terabyte—for less than $160. My docking setup at work has an external USB drive plugged into it, which makes it easy to take a snapshot of my important files before I take the laptop out of the office where it could be lost or damaged.
And I take a laptop with me pretty much everywhere. With my Verizon EVDO card, I can be online almost anywhere there’s a cellular connection. Although my coworkers make heavy use of their Treo 700 smart phones with built-in support for Outlook calendar and email, when it comes to getting work done remotely, I prefer my laptop and my cheap old Motorola RAZR.
The only downside of living on a laptop is what happens when they get lost, which I’ll talk about next month.
Optical mice
When describing my desktop setup above, I mentioned my optical mouse. If you’re still using either an old “ball mouse” or one without a scroll wheel (a little vertical dial between the left and right buttons), you should drive to your nearest office supply store right now and get an optical mouse with a scroll wheel. The Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse will set you back less than $20 at Staples, and you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.
Optical mice use the reflection of a (red) light in the bottom of the mouse to gauge motion. They’re more accurate than ball mice and, more important, they don’t get dirty. Ball mice pick up dirt and oil on the rollers (which sense ball motion) and generally develop a tendency to skip when not cleaned regularly.
In addition to the consistent non-skip performance of an optical wheel mouse, the scroll wheel makes moving through long Microsoft Word documents or Web pages trivial. You don’t move the mouse at all, just spin the wheel with your forefinger. If you’re an enlightened employer, invest in these little wonders for all your knowledge workers. They’ll love you for it.
The Coscto technology forecast
Some people wonder how I stay on top of technology trends. One way is by visiting Costco on a regular basis. For example, this week at Costco, I saw a networked, duplex color laser printer (the Hewlett-Packard 2605dn) for $425. The network feature means any computer on your office network can access the printer (printers connected to a particular machine require that machine to be turned on to print). The duplex feature means that you can print both sides of the paper without having to turn it over.
Less than 18 months ago, I paid slightly more than $1,000 for a terrific Ricoh CL4000 laser printer with most of the same features (although a somewhat higher monthly page rating). If you’re still spending a bundle on replacement color ink cartridges for an inkjet color printer in your office, it really makes sense to switch. Inkjets really only make sense for photo printing anymore.
Another cool (and useful) thing I saw at Coscto was an all-digital video recorder for $90. The Pure Digital Flip (www.theflip.com) is about the size of a paperback book. It has a lens on one side and an LCD viewfinder (like you’d find on a digital camera or camcorder) on the back. There’s an on/off button, a play button and a record button. Turn it on, press record and the camera stores a video stream in its 512 Mbytes of internal solid-state memory. When you’re done, flip out the built-in USB connector, and copy the video onto your Mac or PC for editing. Then you can email it, post it on your company Website or upload it to YouTube. A 60-minute (1GB) version is available for less than $130.
There are lots of applications for this type of recorder, where a brief video with sound may be more readily understood than a series of digital still pictures with a text narrative. For example, an auto claims adjuster could walk entirely around a car, describing the damage. Smaller businesses can make easy “how-to” videos relating to their product. Sure, it’s not broadcast-quality video, but the ability to create videos easily and on-demand has a value all its own. For $90, it’s worth getting one just for experimenting.
The last thing I saw this week at Costco (besides the plethora of large-screen LCD, plasma and projection TVs) was a terabyte of disk storage about the size of a dictionary for $330. It’s astonishing to me that 1,000 gigabytes of storage costs about 30 cents a gigabyte. Of course, the downside of a single, large volume like this is, if it fails, you lose a lot of stuff. So backup and archiving is essential.
The cost of sophisticated, almost magical, technology continues to drop, and more and more stuff is being digitized and stored (requiring bigger and bigger disk drives). How would you operate your business differently if nearly unlimited disk storage cost next to nothing and you could digitize almost anything effortlessly? Start thinking now, because a visit to Costco tells me that day is much closer than it appears.
