Are they worth doing though? Well, at the outset I’d have said that it was a definite “no”. After all, there’s quite a bit of work to be done before you get any benefit from such a system. Whilst it’s clearly a good idea to be able to find things and certainly handy to be able to pull up the documents onscreen rather than hunting through a whole bunch of files to find something, there’s quite an effort to go through before you reach that stage. For one thing, it takes time to enter a document into the system with a minute or two to scan documents and adding all the meta-information in the form of dates, titles, keywords and so on.

Moreover there’s the problem that you don’t get any of the advantages for a few months (how long the delay is depends on your business) so you’re plugging away for ages before you can really see why. Sure, you could process all the historical documents and get the advantages sooner but few people have the time, money or inclination to do that.

Once you get over that hump you soon wonder how you did without the system. The only problem then is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find documents that predate the system which for many means a period of a few months more ’til those historical documents cease to be quite so relevant.

So, very worthwhile doing but put some thought into how you’ll motivate staff to enter details for the several months it takes before the system becomes one of those “can’t do without it” systems.

It’s certainly true that the software available these days is right up there with that which professional printers would use in pretty much every circumstance. The home-use page setting software of today is way beyond the capabilities of the professional page setting software of a few years back and most word processors are pretty much up to that standard too these days. Moreover, there’s the major plus point that doing it yourself means that the page looks just like you want it to ie there’s none of the interpretation that professionals apply to your ideas.

However, when you print it out it’s a whole different matter. Everything from business cards to wedding invitations is turned out on home printers these days and usually on inappropriately light card and with none of the embossing that gives such things the appropriate level of impressiveness. Usually that printing choice is down to a combination of perceived cost and perceived speed but neither really stand up. For reasonable volume there’s little difference in the cost since your own printer ink is pretty expensive and moreover you’re getting better quality printing, paper and potentially embossing too for the price. Whilst it’s true that you’re never going to get the stuff back in your hand immediately if you use a printer, for the likes of business and invitation cards the day or two delay is hardly going to be an issue, is it?

At the very least you should consider professional printing for specialty printing jobs.

Free doesn’t mean low quality either. There are excellent tools around to analyse the keywords on your site and compare it with those of your competitors. In years gone by that would have cost your serious money but these days very good tools are around to do it free.

In fact there are a whole raft of excellent free tools. The problem is working out what to do with them, what the results mean and what you can do to correct any problems that are thrown up. Take, for example, the incoming links. Although more is better, how many is “enough”? That depends on what your competitors results are (you can use these tools on them as well as on your own site). If you don’t have “enough”, what do you do about it? That’s easy too: just subscribe to one of the many directory listings services and stand back as the incoming links start rolling in.

Then they started putting out versions of the netbooks with hard disks and the screens started getting bigger and the definition became rather more difficult.

These days there’s quite an overlap in the things. Fairly low end “netbooks” come with 10″ screens and 250GB disks these days. Move up just a little and you can be talking in terms of 12″ screens and 7 hour battery life. Right now it seemed that the only difference was in terms of the battery life but even that’s becoming dodgy as what would previously have been called a notebook can sport 8 hours of battery life and have a processor that runs somewhat faster than low end laptops.

Coming soon is the final nail in the coffin ie the inclusion of a DVD drive in a “netbook”.

At the moment the only real definition seems to be one of price although even there there’s an increasing overlap in the prices of high end netbooks and low end notebooks.

That’s where custom software comes into play. With bespoke software basically you can ask for anything although obviously that flexibility comes with a cost and, sometimes, a substantial one.

However, regardless of the upfront price of your software solution, it’s worth considering the ongoing cost of maintenance and upgrades with bespoke software. Whilst with standard software it’s simply a matter of paying up for the latest upgrade, in the case of bespoke software you’ll generally need to specify your requirements as they change and, eventually, the software may need to be rewritten (allow for this cropping up after no more than 10 years).

I’m sure there are still a few people around who still fondly remember the Model T Ford which was the car that really started the motoring habit around the world. Just think that without that we’d not have McDonalds!

Even now I’d still quite fancy having my own PDP-8 since it was the first computer that I really got to know. Sure, it’s seriously outdated but even so. Would you believe a maximum memory of the equivalent of 48k bytes and 2MB of disc space was enough to support 11 users simultaneously?

However, even the humble compact flash card has a place in my heart if only because it’s so similar to the little memory cards that Mr Spock was forever shuffling in and out of the computer in Star Trek.

My current favourite item of technology is the Acer Aspire One that I’m typing this on now. It’s so cute that I’m expecting to keep it around for long after I would ordinarily have replaced it. This is the computer that really gives the phrase “portable computer” a proper meaning. Sure, it’s not so fast as its bigger siblings but it only adds a second to load times for the wordprocessor or whatever and, let’s face it, all computers have long since become far faster than we really need them to be. It wasn’t that many years ago that you’d never have thought that a computer would ever be fast enough to place full screen video but this little baby hasn’t a problem with it.

Isn’t it peculiar the technological items that we get attached to?

Commonplace are the photo printers which can roll off the prints that you’d ordinarily have had to go to the camera shop to have done and the prices for those are now so low that they make DIY a very cost effective and simple way to produce your holiday prints. Also moving into the mainstream are less common types such as the receipt printer which you’d normally encounter in supermarkets but which are handy add-ons for even the smallest business these days.

Although, in principle, you could buy one printer and use it for all these tasks clearly it’s a whole lot simpler to get the specialised printers for their specific tasks and it’s finally become a fairly economic option.

These days though chances are you’ve gone digital and have a wealth of choice to make to find something that will both fit and work in your camera. There’s the old-timer compact flash which is still used in the very latest professional cameras because of it’s speed. Then there’s a whole range of SD cards and it’s far from obvious if these will work in your camera because some cameras only support up to 1GB (rarely indicated), others up to 2GB and then there’s the high capacity versions starting at 4GB and running up to 16GB at the moment which will actually work in some “normal” cameras too even if they don’t have the SDHC tag on them.

So watch what you’re lifting in the shop!

Older cameras couldn’t really zoom in close enough with the image to allow the fine changing of individual pixels without it being noticed on prints produced from the cameras but these days 8mp cameras are commonplace and at that level of resolution there’s quite a lot you can do on the original without it being noticeable on any prints produced. Fortunately the price of the technology that you need to make the adjustments to the images has also crashed in price so, if you’re into photography, it’s viable to consider buying one of the digital airbrush devices and start playing around with it.

I’ve got one myself and have barely touched the surface of what’s possible. Whilst you can do some of the retouching via a mouse to really make the most of the software available you really need to look at graphics pads which are quite simply fantastic and that’s even at the beginner level – a few months use of it and you’ll not know how you did without it.

The very first computer used clockwork (really: it was built in 1850) but in modern times things began with vacuum tubes before moving on to magnetic drums, then tapes and finally the magnetic discs that we still use today. Actual internal memory went through a similar cycle moving from clockwork to vacuum tubes to magnetic drums then magnetic cores and then on to solid-state or integrated circuits as we’d call them today.

That continual change and improvement in the technology meant that the need to limit memory has all but disappeared. As recently as 1976 for instance it was commonplace to have 11 users sharing all of 48k of memory yet within a few years a single personal computer had a great deal more memory and these days even 2GB of memory rarely seems enough yet that’s 87,000 times the amount that eleven users shared just over 30 years earlier.