Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Quite regularly I come across people who are just starting out in business. Often this is due to dissatisfaction with a corporate career, change in circumstances or location. Many older people who are made redundant or leave their jobs feel they have little job prospects and decide to start a new business. Many are just starting something alongside their existing work hoping it will be enough to let them quit at some point in the future.

Some (not all) talk to an accountant or lawyer and set up the right business structure for their new enterprise. Unfortunately a common mistake many make is to not talk to a trusted advisor about their technology requirements. Too often I am called into help after the investment in retail consumer technology has been made already. Often it is too late to change things, funds have been spent and computers, tablets, printers and phones have been acquired.

The mistakes I have had to fix include:

• Retail consumer level routers that are not able to handle the demands of a small business
• PCs that were purchased with retail licences of the operating system, office productivity software etc.
• Tablets and phones on retail or prepaid phone plans and accounts
• Cheap PCs that were physically not capable of meeting the demands of the office software installed on them
• Hodge podge of retail cloud services, email accounts and domain names (usually no domain name) and no professionally integrated solutions
• Cheap printers that have high consumable costs and cannot handle the demands of a small office
• No understanding of customer data management
• No backup solution (or an untested hope and pray solution) or Business Continuity Plans (BCP)
• and so on

I am constantly running  a lot of applications, and am using the quad core and 2GB RAM that Vista will let me use (out of the 4GB installed) pretty heavily. I frequently see the cores drop into 80-90% use. RAM usage is often over 90%.

Right now I have running:

File Management

CuteFTP

Windows Explorer (2 instances)

Browsers

Internet Explorer 2 open tabs

Firefox 89 open tabs

Java game Settlers of Catan (playing a game with Judith and Miranda while eating lunch and working and writing this)

Particls - newsticker scrolling

Communications

Outlook

MSN MEssenger - 2 conversation windows open

Yahoo Messenger

Skype

8hands

You can now download SnagIt screen capture software for free, no strings attached. Some of the cool features of SnagIt are that you can capture scrolling long web pages, extract text from windows and annotate images. Amit has put up some instructions for us on how to download SnagIt for free.

The Update Checker is just that, it checks if you need an update and gets them ready for you to download. The Update Checker scans your computer for installed software, checks the versions and then send this information to filehippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. Any new releases are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.

The Update Checker works on any Windows PC running Vista, XP, 2003, 2000 or 98 and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

The Update Checker doesn't send any personal information back to filehippo.com. It only collects a list of programs, their versions and the operating system details. Additionally none of this is linked
to your IP address and the logs are deleted after processing.