Keep Your Laptop and Desktop Performing For Years With This Simple Tip

A few days ago, Lance was up in the Cleveland area doing some training with out team. During his visit, he saw some of the older PCs that had been mothballed because of obsolescence.



Now you have to realize that for technology, 3 years for a PC is like 75 years for a human being. It will keep limping along, but there will be new applications that really stress it and some of the latest hardware won’t work with it. It just becomes a real challenge to use.

But at our location, we aren’t doing anything stressful with the systems. We weren't designing microchips or running exotic database engines on them. They were really hosts for browsers with all of our applications hosted on outside systems, like SalesForce.com, G Suite, and hosted email applications.

So when Lance saw these systems back in the back closet just sitting there, his question, naturally, was, “can we make use of these?”

As an IT guy, I like to see the best, fastest and latest technology on hand. From a business perspective, however, these systems were adequate for what we were doing, with some minor modifications, of course.


I told Lance that I would see what we could salvage out of the systems. Naturally, processor speed would be a minor concern, but of more importance were Ethernet capability and memory capacity.

So the first thing I did was to find two systems that were similar, intending to consolidate memory from the two systems into a single system.

Well, upon opening up my first system, I was shocked.

I knew that these things were on the “more mature” side. So, when I opened it up, I expected a certain amount of dust.

I didn’t expect to see the motherboard wearing a wool sweater!

The bottom of the system looked like somebody had called in Empire to install a shag carpet, the processor and fan assembly were nothing more than a gray lump, and the memory assembly could only be found after prodding and poking the board.

This thing had more insulation than my attic.

While it was shocking, the problem was easily correctable. A quick trip to the local Wal-Mart for a $4 can of compressed air and I was able to clean out the entire mess with no trouble at all.

For all of you sales reps out there, heat is the system killer. Your desktop and laptop are equipped with several fan systems to get heat away from the processor, memory and graphics card and vent it out into the general atmosphere. However, it also has to vent air into the box before it can pass it over the core components and vent it back out again. As it sucks air in, it also brings in dust, which eventually settles somewhere inside your machine.

Over the months of bringing in dusty air, that dust builds up on the heat generating parts and keeps the heat transfer from taking place efficiently. It’s no accident that I used the word “sweater” and “insulation” previously. If your processor and memory are wearing sweaters, then the heat is staying close to the devices and not getting transferred out of the machine. And increasing heat on parts like the processor and memory will decrease their useful lifespan.

For a desktop, you will have to remove the side panel before performing your internal dusting. However, you can also use this can-of-air on your laptop as well, to blow out the bits of dust, food, hair clippings and flaked skin out of the keyboard.

For all of you sales reps out there, spending $4 for a can of air is probably the cheapest form of self-maintenance you can get and it will keep your system performing error free for years to come.

Or at least until you buy your next laptop.

Organize Your Sales Activity Through IE7 Tabs

Here is a quick tip for all of you sales reps out there that use Internet Explorer 7 or later.



One of the newer innovations that Microsoft put into it's browser is the tab feature that essentially allows you to have different web pages in a single browser window. As a sales rep, you’re probably saying to yourself, "Yeah, It looks good. There are plenty of bells and whistles in IE7. The techie guys are either drooling over it or they are busy tearing it apart along with Microsoft. But what does it do for me?"




There are a few things that you can do with this feature that may make your life a little bit easier.



Let’s say that you, the sales rep, are out in the field and you use a lot of the hosted applications out there, like SalesForce.com, browser-based email, any Google apps or maybe even GrandCentral internet phone setup.



Using the old method of opening each app in a separate browser, you would end up with a number of different browsers windows cluttering up your desktop. You would spend a lot of time minimizing and maximizing browser windows and trying to figure out which browser held the application you were looking for at the time. It’s a recipe for disorganization.



Using the tabs, you can open one browser window and use the tabs to navigate to your different applications.

For example, let’s say you use a mail application such as the web version of Lotus Notes. While reading your email, you come across a note from one of you clients over at Steris Corporation (just as an example) and you need to check them out in Salesforce.com.



Instead of clicking on the browser icon and bringing up another browser window, all I have to do is click on that little square next to your current tab as pictured below:



and it will bring up a new tab with a blank page:



From that page, you can then use your favorite method to navigate to your new destination page on SalesForce.com. You’ll end up with something that looks like this:



Now you have access to your email and your SalesForce.com account.



Let’s say that in addition to this, you also need to have the client’s website available, your company’s website available, the Google search engine up and Google traffic maps up just in case you want to check on traffic before driving out to see the client.



After performing the same function used above, you end up with a browser environment that looks like this:



Now here is where the fun starts. You have the ability to rearrange the tabs to best suite your working environment merely by dragging and dropping them. For instance, using the right mouse button, I can grab and move the Steris tab from the middle position:



to the first position:



The other thing we can do is to use the quick tab button, located right next to the star and plus sign (or the "add favorites" icon). The quick tab feature gives you a thumbnail view of everything that you might have open, like this:





From this view, you can quickly navigate to the tab you need simply by clicking on the thumbnail.



If you use a lot of hosted applications and access them through your browser, using tabbed browsing in this fashion will add some organization to your daily activities and increase your overall effectiveness.