Having a small business is freeing in many ways. Large corporations, once they get big enough, must adhere to strict methods of operating in order to manage its people most effectively, and therefore stay successful. A small business, however, has much more wriggle room. If an IT solution isn’t working, it’s not likely to take down a whole department with it. You are free at your discretion to choose how and what computer solutions to use.
Want to run the entire business from a tablet? If it’s practical for you, you can go for it. Want to ask your staff to provide their own laptop stations? If they aren’t opposed, and with a degree of reason, you might be able to get them to.
However, like with any business, you are still reliant on these IT solutions working, and that means IT repair or maintenance costs. There are ways to mitigate this. A quick solution here can prevent a costly error from happening down the road. If you’re not particularly IT aware, it’s worth looking into how you could improve. There is always an app or program that could help you function better to such a degree that you’ll question how you operated without it.
This list will help you enact these fixes:
Turn Old Laptops Into Functional New Machines
If you’re just starting up, you might think that it’s going to cost a significant amount of money to set up all of your computer systems. It doesn’t have to. Use a service like CloudReady that allows you to turn old laptops into functioning Chromebooks. Using a Linux reimagining of Chrome OS, the memory requirements of your laptop are dramatically reduced, allowing it to function like new. What better way could there be to set up an entire set of employees with their own workstation? Purchase a few used laptops from eBay and you’re good to go.
You may even be able to purchase these in a bulk deal and get an even better discount. Be sure to trawl auction websites and back page listings. Thinkpads are the best to look for, because of their wildly popular use in schools and business. This means every few years a flood of cheap machines will appear online for purchase at dirt cheap rates.
Stay On Top Of Hard Drive Health
When you are set up with either old or new machines, it can be tempting to just leave things as they are until an issue occurs, and deal with it then. This isn’t likely to hurt you until later on down the road, so it can be tempting to view it as an issue you’ll get to later and then forget about totally. Unfortunately, there are problems that can go wrong at any time with your IT equipment, and usually, it’s going to be the hard drive that’s the issue.
Hard drives are intricate pieces of kit and have plenty of moving parts. Thanks to this, it’s likely that they’ll fail within a few years. Download a software application that will allow you to monitor your hard drive health. If there is an issue, it’s worth using a hard drive recovery service to help reclaim all of your important offline files. In future, consider backing up your important files on a secondary HDD or USB, or even use cloud storage if you have a competitive internet package.
Be sure to check the warranty on all of your IT purchases. If you buy used, it might be worth weighing up the pros and cons of getting cheap equipment that isn’t under warranty.
Use your professional wisdom here, and you’re likely to gather some fantastic IT solutions and maintain it for a fraction of the cost you initially expected.