3 Ways Your Computer Can Help Turn Your Home Office Green

These days everyone is looking for more ways to clean up the environment.  If you have a home office, here are some ideas to help you use your desktop and laptop computers to make your lifestyle greener.

Consider using digital storage instead of printing everything out. You can scan important legal documents and store them on your hard drive instead of keeping multiple hard copies in storage.  Even if you work in an industry that requires by law that you keep records for a number of years, you can usually find ways to at least reduce the amount of printouts you do on a regular basis.  And at this point, many state and federal laws have been amended to allow digital storage of files that need to be maintained for several years.

There are now many online vendors to choose from who can provide digitally secure storage for your computer’s files.  The cost of online storage is usually a lot less than renting an off-site storage unit to fill with boxes and boxes of paper.  If you can use digital storage, you can save money, and you can also save a lot of trees.

If you use a fax system regularly, you can save money by switching to an online fax service. You won’t have to waste paper and printer ink on spam faxes or faxes that are incomplete…just delete them from your hard drive.  You also won’t miss out on important faxes because of an empty ink cartridge.  Not only will you save on paper and printer ink, but you‘ll have an automatic digital copy on your hard drive of every fax you send or receive.  And you’ll never have to buy a new fax machine again.  Just do an internet search for online fax services and choose the one with a plan that fits your needs.

Another way to reduce using paper is to switch to online banking and billing.  Most  banks and utility companies today have options for paperless billing.  You can receive and pay all of your bills online.  In fact, most other services that bill you on a regular basis now have the option for online billing.  Cable companies, credit card companies and phone companies all have the resources to eliminate paper bills and make all of your transactions online.  By handling all of your bills online, you can save reams of paper and have copies of your transactions automatically stored on your hard drive.

It’s easy to see that the more you use your computer, the greener your office will be.  Start with these small steps.  Then if you want to get really serious about having a green home office, you can always add solar panels to power your computers.

The shed: a beautiful retreat or office

People who have yearned for their own exercise studio or office, but don’t have room for one in the house, are going outside. They are remolding the shed or building new backyard rooms.

Called garden buildings in Europe, they are popular in many countries. In the U.S., architects say they’re part of a trend to move the outdoors in and the indoors outside.

An accomplished do-it-yourselfer can build a 10-foot by12-foot room from a kit for as little as $2,000 to $10,000, though many people are willing to pay much more. They want a retreat where they can “get away from it all.”

Adding electricity, heat, and air conditioning brings the price up by several thousand dollars, but worth every penny of it.

To check prices, visit a lumber yard, or go online to www.OutdoorsStorageSheds.com, where you’ll be able to research, and even buy a kit for your own “backyard shed” turned “perfect retreat”.

Most buildings come with a floor. If your ground is level, you can support the floor with patio stones or concrete blocks.

Is Your Computer Slow Lately?

Here are a few questions for you:
*Is Your System not as fast as it used to be?
*Does your PC keep crashing?
*System not as stable as you would like?
*Receiving error messages and don’t know why?

Most of the above can be easily fixed without having to pay a technician. It may be time for a Computer Clean Up. The following instructions below will give you step by step instructions on how to ensure your PC continues to operate at its fullest potential. These instructions are relevant for machines running Windows XP and using Internet Explorer.

1. To begin, open up Internet Explorer, that’s the blue lower case letter “e”, generally shown in the lower left corner of your screen. Next click on the word Tools up at the top of your screen. Once open, click Internet Options. In the middle of that box you’ll see a section called Temporary Internet Files. Click the Delete Files button. Click the box Delete offline content too, then OK. Once that is done, click the Delete Cookies button within the Temporary Internet Files section. Click OK there too.

2. Next click the Settings button. Check for newer versions of stored pages should be clicked to Automatically if it isn’t already. Change the Amount of Disk Space to use to 8MB. Click OK twice.

3. Next go to the Start button in the very lower left corner of your screen. Click My Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Check Disk Clean up. Use offline content or anything else it asks. It will take a few moments while it is checking how much space it can clean up. When you get the new pop-up window, make sure there are checks in every box. Click OK

4. After running Disk Clean up, go to Ad-Aware, update and run the program. After running Ad-Aware, reboot your computer.

5. If your computer is still slow, your registry may have errors. You can scan your colmputer for free at the Registry Fix website.

You should perform the above maintenance about once a week. Then on an as-needed basis, run Disk Defrag, which you can find in Start, My Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defrag.

By following the above simple steps your computer should continue to run at optimum performance!

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