Since Ink cartridges are a recurring need to keep a printer going, it is much easier to buy refilled ink or filling it yourself using refill kits.

Ordering refilled cartridges online is probably the easiest option. It is simple and the cost of these ink cartridges is considerably lower. However, there are a few things to remember or watch out for while choosing your supplier. Even after you make up your mind, it is advisable to try a few cartridges before placing bulk orders.

It might be preached that, a refilled cartridge makes the warranty on the printer void. This is NOT true and the warranty on the printer still stands even if you use recycled ink, as per the law..

Here are a few tips that could help you pick your supplier:

1. The company should have a street address. This would authenticate their presence. It is much better to have a street address rather than a P.O.Box address.

2. It might be handy to have your supplier’s customer care number in case there is a problem with the refilled cartridge. A phone number would help you reach them in much lesser time and is definitely a more convenient way of communicating. If a phone number is not available, you must insist on an email address at least.

A good online retailer should typically have the following on their website to make things easy for you. 1. Glossary Of Terms: This should contain the understandable version of any technical term used or any jargon that is used to describe the technicalities of a printer and its part or about the ink cartridge.

2. Refunds: This is the one you need to read carefully. Before you make a purchase, it is very important to know what the companies refund policies are. There could be a few things involved, such as, refund being made only within a certain period of time or what needs to be done in order to get a refund. How to go about it etc.

3. Exchange: In some cases you might want to have your cartridges exchanged. For example if you have bought the wrong cartridge or you mixed up the model of the printer for which you wish to make the purchase. Here again it would be handy to know the policies in place. The policies could change with the companies.

4. Cancellations: This could be an important factor when you pick your supplier. If you wish to make a cancellation, you would need to know how it can be done, if there is a timeline involved, whether or not you get a full refund etc.

5. Frequently asked questions: This section would take care of your general queries and save you time that you would have to spend otherwise calling them. This would help you find out more about the company.

6. Simple product election procedures: You should be able to select the product by the model of your printer either by its name or number.

7. Money Back Guarantee: Most good companies would offer you a money back guarantee without too much hassle. This could also be a confidence booster because if a company hesitates in promising you a refund, chances are that the company is not too sure of its product. On the other hand if there is a simple money back guarantee, the product should be good.

8. Shipping Instructions: Most companies would offer free shipping if the purchase is over a certain amount, which could vary from. They would also give you indications of timelines of how much time it is likely to take. Some companies do not offer free shipping. This needs to be clearly understood to avoid getting unpleasant surprises.

9. Data Security: This could be an extremely important factor in choosing your supplier. During the registration process, you might enter details that are not personal. Your details such as, phone number, address, email address etc need to be protected. This is where the privacy policy is important. If these details are sent out, you could be at the receiving end of unsolicited emails or phone calls. During the process of making a payment you might enter your credit card details, which obviously is confidential. To make sure this information is not handled carelessly, you must check the data security or the privacy policies of the company.

10. Tracking: Once your shipment is on its way there should be some method of knowing where exactly the packet is. Should it take longer than usual or get lost, the order tracking information would prove useful.

There is obviously no better way to find the best dealer than to keep looking for one that you are happy with. However, these pointers could give you things to look out for and help you find the right supplier.

John Sollars is the managing director of Solar Electronics, which are both ink and pc peripheral suppliers based in Shropshire, UK. To access a comprehensive online shop of original and re-manufactured printer inks please visit http://www.mega-office.co.uk

PCI

The expansion slots available on motherboards allow for a variety of upgrades in a computer system, but matching the appropriate card to an available slot needs to be addressed before making any purchasing decisions. The most common types of expansion cards for modern computer systems can be broken down into three formats: PCI, AGP, and PCI Express. Each of these formats will be addressed separately in this three part series of Tech Tips, starting with PCI.

The letters “PCI” stand for Peripheral Component Interconnect, and is the term used to describe a bus that connects components directly to the system’s memory and to the system’s processor through the “frontside bus.” When discussing communications on a motherboard, the term “bus” has nothing to do with the big yellow thing that takes the kids to school. There may be several buses in a computer, and like the PCI bus, they are all responsible for managing the communication “traffic” from different devices to the processor.

The frontside bus is a high speed connection that manages the processor’s communication with items such as hard drives, memory, and PCI devices, while not burdening the processor with all of the management responsibilities.

First developed by Intel in the early 1990s, PCI was spawned from even earlier (and slower) bus architectures such as ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) and VL-Bus (VESA Local), which were common back in the 1980s and 1990s.

The original specifications for the PCI Bus had a speed of 33 MHz, with a 32-bit bus width, and a maximum bandwidth of 132 MB per second. There have been a few revisions to the PCI standard which have significantly increased these specifications, taking it to 66 MHz, 64-bit, and 512 MB per second, respectively. The 32-bit and 64-bit versions have different physical features, and most motherboards only offer 32-bit connections. The original power specification had PCI devices operating on 5V DC, and with the revisions came the capability for devices to continue using 5V, as well as now being able to operate on 3.3V DC.

A simple explanation of 32-bit and 64-bit can be had by continuing the analogy of buses and traffic. Think of each bit as a lane of traffic on the communication path. Think of a 32-bit bus as having 32 lanes of traffic, and a 64-bit bus having 64 lanes of traffic. Just as a greater number of cars can travel simultaneously on a road with more lanes, more data can be transferred on a bus with a larger bit count.

Motherboards can support multiple slots sharing one PCI Bus, and although not particularly common, can include more than one PCI bus. Depending on the form factor size of the motherboard, and other features that may be taking up space on the board, one can expect to have one to six PCI slots on a typical motherboard. For example, the mATX format features just two 32-bit PCI slots, while the ATX format features six 32-bit PCI slots.

A 32-bit PCI card features 124 pins for mating with a slot on a system’s motherboard, and will fit into either a 32-bit or 64-bit slot (although data transfer will be 32-bit in either type of slot).

A 64-bit PCI card features 184 pins for mating with the appropriate slot on a system’s motherboard, but can generally fit into a 32-bit slot as well, as long as features on the motherboard do not interfere. When installed in a 32-bit slot, data transfer on a 64-bit card will be limited to 32-bit.

The Intel STL2 Dual Socket 370 Server Board w/VRM The Intel STL2 Dual Socket 370 Server Board is a good reference for comparing 32-bit and 64-bit PCI slots. Looking at the lower left corner of the motherboard shows four 32-bit PCI slots and two 64-bit PCI slots.

Subsequent installments in this series of Tech Tips will look at AGP and PCI Express, each of which has its own unique physical features. Although the different format PCI cards may be interchangeable, PCI, AGP, and PCI Express cards do not work (or fit) in any other type of slot.

Most PCI cards will be of the 32-bit variety, and the selection of items available is fairly extensive. Graphics cards, sound cards, network cards, RAID controllers, TV tuners, modems, and USB/Firewire controllers are all common items that may be added to a system through the use of a PCI card.

Many of the items listed in the previous paragraph can be found integrated on modern motherboards, but these onboard devices offer no upgrade ability. PCI devices provide plug and play installation, allowing a user to install (or remove) a device with ease. For example, an inexpensive 2-channel sound card may be good enough for someone initially, but down the road they may decide that something like the 7.1 channel Sound Blaster Audigy 2 offers the sound quality they really want. Upgrading is a matter of powering down the system, swapping the cards, rebooting, and installing the new software/drivers (OK, perhaps a bit over simplified). The good thing about PCI cards is that, even if you do have a board with built-in feature (such as built-in sound mentioned above), your motherboard’s BIOS will usually lets you disable that feature if you did want to add an upgraded card (such as the Audigy sound card mentioned in the example above), or the card can complement the feature already built-in (such as an IDE RAID card).

The one area that drove the development of AGP is the performance of PCI based graphics cards. The demands of fast-paced video games, and other graphically intensive applications, require a great deal of bandwidth, which just wasn’t available on the PCI Bus. Considering that all of the devices on the PCI Bus share the bandwidth available, an even faster, dedicated bus was required to handle just the graphics data. PCI graphics cards are still available though, and make for an easy way to add a second display to a system currently operating on an AGP or PCI Express graphics card.

Final Words

The PCI slot has been around for a while, and seems to have a place in at least the near future of computer architecture. AGP and PCI Express offer performance benefits that the PCI standard cannot match, but for many applications, the performance offered by PCI is more than adequate. Be sure to check out the next Tech Tips in this series for the basics of AGP.

Computer tech tips and computer help

Impact printers, as the very name implies means that the printing mechanism touches the paper for creating an image. Impact printers were used in early 70s and 80s. In Dot Matrix printers a series of small pins is used to strike on a ribbon coated with ink to transfer the image on the paper.

Other Impact Printers like Character printers are basically computerized typewriters. They have a series of bars or a ball with actual characters on them, which strike on the ink ribbon to transfer the characters on the paper. At a time only one character can be printed. Daisy Wheel printers use a plastic or metal wheel. These types of printers have limited usage though because they are limited to printing only characters or one type of font and not the graphics.

There are Line printers where a chain of characters or pins, print an entire line, which makes them pretty fast, but the print quality is not so good. Thermal printers are nothing but printers used in calculators and fax machines. They are inexpensive to use. Thermal printers work by pushing heated pins against special heat sensitive paper.

More efficient and advanced printers have come out now which use new Non-impact Technology.

Non-impact printers are those where the printing mechanism does not come into the contact of paper at all. This makes them quieter in operation in comparison to the impact printers.

In mid 1980s Inkjet printers were introduced. These have been the most widely used and popular printers so far. Colour printing got revolutionized after inkjet printers were invented. An Inkjet printer’s head has tiny nozzles, which place extremely tiny droplets of ink on the paper to create an image. These dots are so small that even the diameter of human hair is bigger. These dots are placed precisely and can be up to the resolution of 1440 x 720 per inch. Different combinations of ink cartridges can be used for these printers.

How an Inkjet printer works

The print head in this printer scans the page horizontally back and forth and another motor assembly rolls the paper vertically in strips and thus a strip is printed at a time. Only half a second is taken to print a strip. Inkjet printers were very popular because of their ability to colour print. Most inkjets use Thermal Technology. Plain copier paper can be used in these printers unlike thermal paper used for fax machines. Heat is used to fire ink onto the paper through the print head. Some print heads can have up to 300 nozzles. Heat resistant and water based ink is used for these printers.

The latest and fastest printers are Laser Printers. They use the principal of static electricity for printing it as in photocopiers. The principle of static electricity is that it can be built on an insulated object. Oppositely charged atoms of objects (positive and negative) are attracted to each other and cling together. For example, pieces of nylon material clinging to your body, or the static you get after brushing hair. A laser printer uses this same principle to glue ink on the paper.

How Laser Printer works:

Unlike the printers before, Laser printers use toner, static electricity and heat to create an image on the paper. Toner is dry ink. It contains colour and plastic particles. The toner passes through the fuser in the computer and the resulting heat binds it to any type of paper. Printing with laser printers is fast and non-smudge and the quality is excellent because of the high resolution that it can achieve with 300 dots per inch to almost 1200 dpi at the higher end.

Basic components of a laser printer are fuser, photoreceptor drum assembly, developer roller, laser scanning unit, toner hopper, corona wire and a discharge lamp. The laser beam creates an image on the drum and wherever it hits, it changes the electrical charge like positive or negative. The drum then is rolled on the toner. Toner is picked up by charged portion of the drum and gets transferred to the paper after passing through the fuser. Fuser heats up the paper to amalgamate ink and plastic in toner to create an image. Laser printers are called “page printers” because entire page is transferred to the drum before printing. Any type of paper can be used in these printers. Laser printers popularized DTP or Desk Top Publishing for it can print any number of fonts and any graphics..

This is how the computer and printer operate to print

When we want to print something we simply press the command “Print”. This information is sent to either RAM of the printer or the RAM of the computer depending upon the type of printer we have. The process of printing then starts. While the printing is going on, our computer can still perform a variety of operations. Jobs are put in a buffer or a special area in RAM or Random Access Memory and the printer pulls them off at its own pace. We can also line up our printing jobs this way. This way of simultaneously performing functions is called spooling. Our computer and the printer are thus in constant communication.

John Sollars is the managing director of Solar Electronics, which are both ink and pc peripheral suppliers based in Shropshire, UK. To access a comprehensive online shop of original and re-manufactured printer ink cartridges please visit http://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk

In the first two installments of this series of Tech Tips, we took a look at PCI and AGP, undoubtedly the most common expansion slots in a computer today. With a few key improvements over both of these, PCI Express is destined to replace both and offer a whole new level of computer performance.

PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG)As with AGP and PCI, the development of PCI Express can be attributed to Intel. This time, however, they partnered with some other heavy hitters in the industry, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Dell. Although it is now known as PCI Express, that was not their initial choice for its name. If it wasn’t for PCI-SIG, the committee that oversees the PCI standard, we might be referring to this new format at 3GIO (Third GenerationInput / Output).

PCI Express development finds its roots in the PCI and AGP standards, but the physical connections are not interchangeable, and we will see that this is not the only difference. In the PCI standard, data from the various devices travels over a shared bus to the system. In the AGP standard, a dedicated, point-to-point interface transmits the data from the graphics card to the system. The PCI Express approach to data transfer involves a collection of two-way, serial connections that carries data in packets, similar to the way a network connection operates.

The data from a PCI Express device will no longer have to travel over a single bus, or a single dedicated connection, but can use a combination of these two-way serial connections to optimize throughput. The terms “lane” and “link” don’t sound like anything overly technical, but take on special meaning with PCI Express. A link is the physical connection between PCI Express devices, which can consist of multiple lanes that transmit and receive data independently. Links can be composed of 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, or 32 lanes, and the configuration allows flexibility in assigning just as many lanes as needed to any particular device. There are obvious benefits to this approach, and a few of the more significant include the following points…

Each lane of PCI Express communication is dedicated between two points, so there is no sharing of bandwidth. PCI’s main bottleneck was that all the devices were sharing the equivalent of one lane, and all of the available bandwidth also had to be shared.

Multiple lanes can be assigned to devices whose performance would benefit from the extra speed and bandwidth. A PCI Express graphics card might be assigned 16 lanes (also referred to as x16), while a network adaptor might be assigned just 1 lane. Each lane you make available to a device increases the potential for performance, as the data is sequenced up/down each available lane to optimize throughput. This process of sending the next byte of data down the next available lane is referred to as data striping, and obviously more lanes are better for instances where a good deal of data needs to be transmitted quickly.

Speaking of graphics cards, another benefit is that multiple high performance graphics cards can be installed on one motherboard. The flexibility of PCI Express allows for two x16 PCI Express slots to be included for dual graphics cards, something that in the past required one AGP slot and one PCI slot. And due to the performance limitations, the AGP and PCI combination could not really be considered high performance. In addition to two x16 slots allowing for dual display operation, when incorporating specific graphics cards on a motherboard supporting nVidia’s SLi technology, the resources of the two separate cards can be bridged together for even greater performance on one display. An example of such a motherboard can be seen in DFI’s LAN Party UT nF4 SLi-D.

Just as motherboards supported both AGP and PCI as a means of allowing dual displays, some motherboards offer both an AGP slot and a PCI Express slot. Not only does this allow the user the ability to run dual displays, it provides the added benefit of allowing an upgrade to be completed in stages. If a new PCI Express capable motherboard was just purchased, perhaps in addition to a new processor, the budget conscience user may not want to spring for a new graphics card right away. By making an AGP slot available on boards such as the ECS 915P-A, there is no reason to retire a perfectly good AGP card just because one bought a new motherboard supporting PCI Express.

PCI Express graphics cards are quite similar to AGP cards, except for the connector configuration. The physical size and layout are comparable, and even the prices are not that different. The current selection of graphics cards at Geeks.com doesn’t allow you to compare apples to apples in any one card, but one may find many of the same AGP cards available in PCI Express format for roughly the same price (or for even less money). For the time being, the markets seem to be running in parallel, but in time a shift will occur in favor of PCI Express dominating the market.

Minimizing the cost involved in motherboard fabrication could be another benefit. Let’s look at the example of a network adaptor requiring just 1 lane to operate. If this was a PCI based network adaptor, traces for the standard 32-bit bus would need to reach this device, instead of the four traces required for 1 PCI Express lane. Motherboard design will obviously weigh heavily on this benefit ever being realized, and it is possible that higher-end boards might actually require more traces.

Before taking a look at the ultimate benefit of PCI Express, the performance, let’s have a refresher on the capabilities of PCI and AGP. The standard PCI bus has a width of 32-bit, operates at 33 MHz, and provides a maximum bandwidth of 132 MB/s (which has to be shared by all devices connected). AGP 8x has a 32-bit bus width, operates at 533 MHz, and provides a maximum (dedicated) bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s.

Each PCI Express lane is capable of 250 MB/s in each direction, and as advances in the necessary silicon technologies are realized, that number can be expected to quadruple. Presently, a 164-pin x16 slot can be expected to provide around 4GB/s of usable bandwidth in either direction, which is almost double the 2.1GB/s bandwidth that AGP 8x could offer! Definitely an impressive increase, and as the technology is refined, it will be very interesting to see the performance scale up.

In the previous paragraph, I mentioned that the x16 slot features 164 pins. Each of the different lane configurations is accompanied by a different physical connector, and a sampling of an x16, x8, x4, and x1 can be seen here. For a real world example, the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Athlon 64 Socket 939 motherboard shows an actual installation of one x16 slot and two x1 slots.

Graphics cards are obviously going to benefit the most from the power and performance available with PCI Express, but as mentioned, other devices will also be able to take advantage of this new standard. The example of a network adaptor is just one that not another benefit is that multiple high performance graphics cards can be installed on one motherboardonly can use PCI Express, but will also see performance benefits. A Gigabit Ethernet adaptor will be more likely to actually achieve its rated speed thanks to the main bottleneck being removed in the form of the slower, narrower PCI Bus. Other bandwidth intensive devices, such as RAID controllers, can also be expected to jump off of the slower PCI Bus and find a smoother ride on PCI Express. Although PCI devices requiring less bandwidth may not see any performance benefits from going to PCI Express, as the standard achieves greater mainstream acceptance, the cost implications may find these devices shifting over anyway, just as happened with the transition from ISA to PCI.

Final Words

The higher speeds and flexibility available from PCI Express have it destined to not only be the successor to AGP 8x, but to PCI as well. The immediate performance increase over the older technologies is quite impressive, and given time the benefits will be even greater. Only time will tell how long this transition will take, but somewhere in the not-too-distant future we will be talking about motherboards that only support PCI Express, and AGP and PCI will go the way of the lowly ISA slot.

Computer Geeks,tech tips,and computer help!

First a little history lesson….. There was a time, long ago that printers had ribbons and used dot matrix printing to create tiny dots that, when looked at, were readable. Sometimes they were BARELY readable, however. Changing ribbons and printing wheels to change type face was a chore.

Then, in 1984, the first laser printer that used toner cartridges came into being. Quickly, no one wanted a dot matrix printer anymore. The laser printer caused powder from the toner to fuse onto the paper & the output was much clearer and much more professional in appearance. Very soon, dot matrix printers became known as "door stops".

By 1990, ink printers that used drop-in ink became readily available and very reasonable prices. These ink cartridges were very easy to change without any fuss. The cost to the user, compared to the toner , was significantly reduced though overall cost being more a question of cents per page tended to favour the toners.

So this is where it starts getting pretty cool…. Today, ink printers using inks are so affordable that every computer owner can afford to own their own printer that is capable of using photo quality inks or for less expensive printing, inks that are remanufactured or "generic" or non-original manufacture. These can even be refilled in many cases to save even more in printing costs.

The price of the machines themselves has dropped by buckets and what they can do is way cooler than ever before. Not only can you print but also scan, fax (many do PC-Fax), copy, make your morning coffee, take out the garbage (ok not those last 2). Combining this many tasks obviously reduces the number of different machines in your home/office but in addition there’s only one manual you have to completely ignore instead of many (for the guys reading this).

When using inks that are photo quality, it is sensible to use photo quality paper for your printing. This ensures the best quality print out resulting from your photo quality cartridge. While these inks will print on regular paper, it is a waste to place the more expensive ink cartridge into your printer and then print on plain non-glossy paper.

For every day printing in black and white or even in color, remanufactured or non-original inks work great and save dollars for you in the long run. As a general rule of thumb, you need to purchase twice as many black inks because there is, on average, more black printing needs for the average person.

Nowadays manufacturers are including more and more technology into their products and trying to convince you that their ink has that extra special something. Epson uses DURABrite ink, HP uses Vivera ink and the list goes on. If you ever get bored and feel the need to work yourself into a frenzy just try surfing some of the major sites to compare exactly what one manufacturers ink does compared to the next. If you come away from this sane you’ll definitely know a lot more techie sounds words than you need to know today or in your next lifetime.

Many of the latest inks have cool gizmos in them like small chips designed to monitor the ink levels and tell you when its time to reorder and even little LEDs for those of you who want their printer to light up like a disco. The idea of the chip sounds great but there are cases where the chip is telling the printer to stop working too soon or even to not work at all if the consumables inside are not original (there’s been at least one of the major players recently sued over exactly this). To try and counter this a ‘chip resetter’ can be purchased which basically tells the chip to do as its told and keep on printing regardless of how much ink it thought was left in the tank. As far as the issue with these chips and non originals are concerned its actually illegal for a chip to stop your machine working on this basis but apparently this hasn’t deterred a few of the big boys. Whether a chip resetter will fix this problem is uncertain.

Whether you want to print graphics, brochures, or just letters, there is a printer that uses inks for you. Choose inks that meet your printing needs at affordable prices. Inks have evolved over the years in so many ways that they have in themselves become fairly hi tech let alone the machines that use them. Your average ink printer these days can perform a myriad of functions at prices seemingly getting cheaper by the minute.

Bottom line is yep your inks are getting more high tech and cooler (heck in the old days theres no way your ink or toner cartridge would actually light up with pretty colours for you and tell you when its about to run dry). The future is certainly going to be interesting seeing what comes next…..

Andrew James has owned The Cartridge Specialists (Melbourne) since 2004 selling ink & toner cartridges, and other printing supplies. As a regular author in his industry Andrew can help you save money at home/office & enjoy learning about your high tech toys.

Our corporate intranet is a non-framed environment with both Lotus Domino and IIS (.Net and classic ASP) applications and content. We have between 300,000-500,000 pages of web content and documents across more than 1200 “sites” on approximately 30 unique domains. We used to have Inktomi’s UltraSeek Server 3.0 as our intranet search engine which was beginning to look like its age (purchased in 1998). The Inktomi product did not handle attachments well (DOC, PPT, PDF, etc.), would not crawl our secured sites, and was no longer supported by the vendor. We did a cursory review of the search vendors and were immediately attracted to Google’s 30 day trial offer for their Google Search Appliance (GSA). After signing a standard agreement, they shipped us a brand new shiny yellow unit which we could test for 30 days before returning or purchasing.

Product info

The GSA is a “black box” 1U standard rack-mountable server. By “black box” I mean, Google gives you a web interface to administer the device but do not want you to access the Operating System (a heavily Google-customized version of Linux). In fact, the license agreement stipulates that you will not tamper with the hardware or OS of the appliance in any way. The device has no need for a keyboard, mouse or video – all you need for normal operation is a network cable and standard power input.

The GSA comes in different flavors to fit different needs varying by size of the hardware and correspondingly size of the license. (Licensing is based on the number of URLs crawled by the appliance.) There are 3 different hardware configurations; the GB-1001, GB-5005, and GB-800. These are broken down as follows;

• GB-1001 – 150K documents for $28K, 300K documents for $50K
• GB-5005 – 1.5M documents for $230K
• GB-8008 – 4M documents for $450K

Why Google?

As advertised, the GSA met all of our needs being able to index the large variety of filetypes we have in our environment, access secured content, having a documented API, etc. The Google brand power was another big selling factor. When we told our users that they were going to get a Google-based search engine they knew their days of troubled searching were over. Lastly, the 30-day trial run experience we had with the GSA sealed the deal. The appliance is the easiest enterprise solution I’ve ever had to install, configure and maintain. We were literally up and running within an hour of opening the shipping box.

Installation

The appliance has two network ports on the back panel; one for normal operation and the other used exclusively for network configuration. To configure the network settings we connected a laptop to the appliance via a special (some pin-outs are non-standard) orange Ethernet cable which is included. The installation process was about as easy as one can imagine for a “black box.”

First we plugged in the normal operation network cable and then the power. The power plug on the appliance IS the power switch; plug it in to turn on and unplug it to turn it off. After plugging it in, we waited about 5 minutes for the appliance to play a tune which is the signal to continue. Next, we hooked up our laptop (already set to DHCP mode) to the appliance and powered it up. After logging in to our laptop and making sure we had the correct IP assigned by the appliance’s built-in DHCP server we are ready to configure the network settings. Total elapsed time (excluding rack mounting): 10 minutes.

Configuration

Network configuration, like normal administration, is done entirely through a browser and is a simple 5 step process. The first screens ask you for basic network information; IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS. Subsequent screens collect SMTP server, “From” address for GSA notification messages, time zone, NTP (time) servers and the admin account name/password. The last step is to test a few URLs which you will be crawling to make sure you’ve done the setup correctly. After a final settings review screen configuration is complete and you can then unplug your laptop and get to the good part; start crawling. Total elapsed time: 10 minutes.

Crawling the site(s)

Using the URL provided, all administration of the GSA is done remotely. After logging in with the ID/password we provided in the previous step, we were presented with the Administration console. We created a new collection to hold our index, put in the “Start crawling from” URL, copied that same URL into the “Follow and Crawl only URLs with the Following patterns” box and we were done. We saved our settings and then clicked the “Start crawling” button. We then went over to the “Crawl status” screen and watched the “Crawled URLs” counter increase. Google advertises that it can crawl about 4,000 URLs in about 15 minutes or so. We found the crawl time would increase significantly if there are documents (Word, PDF, Excel, etc.) linked to from those URLS.

After the crawl is done the collection is automatically indexed and then checked against the Serving Prerequisites (any criteria you wish to use to determine whether to move an indexed collection to production) and the collection will either be moved to Production (and consequently searchable) or be moved to Staging. The Staging area lets you validate new crawls before letting users search against them.

Crawling configuration

After your first crawl you may find the need to go back and tweak the crawling parameters. Google gives you a good amount of control over how sites are crawled, the frequency, how many threads are used, etc. For sites with security, the GSA supports Basic Authentication and an additional security module is available which supports Forms Authentication. The most challenging configuration aspects for us were determining the right combination of URL patterns to exclude from the search. If you are a Domino shop and looking to use the GSA you may need to spend some time getting the crawler configuration just right to support the sometimes convoluted Domino query string parameters.

After we got the crawl parameters tuned and the first complete crawl done we did some testing to see if the crawler grabbed all the content. Browsing our site and testing with some strings buried deep inside the taxonomy we always found the GSA had crawled them accurately. We also did some testing with strings inside PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations and the like. When we did come across something that hadn’t been crawled a careful analysis led us to discover that we needed to do some more tweaking of the crawl settings.

Other notable features

Google also gives you a KeyMatch tool that allows you to specify which indexed documents should appear at the top of the results page for a given query. These manifest themselves almost identically to the Sponsored Links at the top of the results page of the Google we all use. A Synonym tool allows you to specify alternate words or phrases for search queries. For example, if someone searches for WCM, you can suggest “Web Content Management” at the top of the results page.

An output format feature lets you control (via an XSLT) the presentation of the search results. You can use this for changing the fonts, colors, logo, header, etc. of the results page. We were able to easily remove the “Cached” feature on the results page with some XSLT modifications.

The Reporting tool lets you run reports on search queries over various time ranges. It will show you the number of searches per day, per hour, the top 100 keywords and top 100 queries for the time period specified.

Downsides

The GSA is not for organizations looking to index their shared network drives as the appliance has no facility for crawling file systems. This is really too bad as many companies struggle with the huge quantities of unstructured content on stored on their networks. Of course, there are a plethora of other products out there for exactly this issue.

Access directly to databases (e.g. SQL, Oracle, etc.) is another area which is off-limits for the GSA as well as any kind of integration with content or document management systems.

Conclusion

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is an excellent search product for HTTP-accessible content. It gives great control over administrative features such as crawler configuration and results serving and sufficient reporting capabilities as well. Those looking for a solution to integrate directly with a content/document management system, databases, or indexing network drives should look to another product. However, if you have a intranet or intranet site with plenty of HTML-based content the GSA may be just what you need.

Bryan Mjaanes is the creator/editor of Intranet101.com, a community-based forum for Intranet professionals.

The best way to re-fill an ink cartridge is to buy an ink re-filling kit. This can be bought from any online store selling ink cartridges. Along with this kit you would be provided with the necessary tools along with a set of instructions on how to go about filling-the-empty-ink-cartridge.

Here are a few simple instructions that could be followed to refill your cartridge and it’s not very complicated.

1. Draw the ink of any one colour with the help of the syringe provided in the re-fill kit. Ideally, this should be done over the sink. This is to make sure that even if some of it spills over no documents, clothes etc. gets ruined. The amount of ink each printer holds usually varies depending upon its manufacturers. For Example, in most Epson printers the black cartridge holds about 17ml of ink and the colour cartridges hold approximately 8ml. Please refer to the instructions on your refill kit to check how much ink should be injected into the cartridge.

2. A small hole needs to be made on top of the cartridge (Could be done with a ball point pen), one for each colour chamber. The hole should be at the top of the cartridge near the label. The needle should be pushed into the hole and the ink injected slowly. If the ink is not injected slowly, it could result in foaming and air bubbles could be formed. If this happens, the re-filled cartridge might not be able to print.

Caution: If this happens, hold the cartridge over a waste paper basket upside down and swing upwards and stop suddenly. This could rectify the problem. If it doesn’t then you could clean the ink heads with cleaner or try soaking the heads. This could remove any dry ink that is clogging the ink heads and allow the ink to flow freely again.

3. The re-fill holes need not be sealed, as there are already breather holes on top of the cartridge.

4. Any ink that is left over in the syringe can be returned to the bottle. The syringe needs to be cleaned with water and dried properly before using it for another colour. It might be handy to use different syringes for different colours.

5. Once the refilled cartridge is placed back in the printer, run the cleaning cycle 1 to 3 times. If there is any gap in printing, the cycle could be run a few more times till the problem is rectified.

Before placing the refilled cartridge back into the printer, you could hold it upside down just to make sure ink is not dripping out of the sponge.

Here are a few things that must be kept in mind before re-filling a cartridge

1. The cartridge needs to be refilled before it is completely empty. If this is not done, the cartridge can dry out completely and get clogged.

2. It might be a good idea to place the refilled cartridge into the printer and leave it alone overnight so that the pressure in the cartridge can stabilize.

3. While making the holes at the top of the cartridge, to inject ink, please make sure you do not hit it too hard or it might crack open the cartridge and make it worthless. It might also make a hairline crack and allow some air in, which in turn would dry the ink out prematurely.

4. Some of the newer models of printers have a green chip in their cartridges. Looking at the cartridge closely one can spot this chip. They are usually known as “Intellidge” cartridges. The chip keeps track of the ink levels in the cartridge and notifies the computer when the ink levels are low. A resetting chip can be used to reset the memory on the chip. With the help of this chip, the printer recognizes the cartridge as being full and allows the refilled cartridge to print.

A refill kit is considerably cheaper than a new cartridge and obviously promises more than just one re-fill. It is therefore, easier on the pocket, keeps us from adding more useless plastic to the environment and increases the life of a cartridge.

A re-fill kit typically contains:

1. Bottles of Ink
2. A bottle of cleaning solution
3. A 2 part syringe
4. A users manual

Something to look out for before buying refilled cartridges

There are some cartridges sold with the “Single Use Only” tag. It is illegal to refill these cartridges with any other ink. This is usually found in Lexmark cartridges. If these cartridges are sent for refilling or refilled cartridges are bought, technically one could face legal charges for doing so. The cartridges that are not marked “Single Use Only” usually come at a higher price.

For such cartridges Lexmark offers a 20% reduction in price if the customer agrees to send the cartridges back to Lexmark.

This does not mean that using refilled cartridges is illegal in any way. All one needs to watch out for is whether the maker has prevented a third party refilling for their own cartridges. This can be understood easily by looking out for any labels such as “Single Use Only”. If there is no such obvious label, it is absolutely all right to go ahead with refilling the empty ink cartridges.

John Sollars is the managing director of Solar Electronics, which are both ink and pc peripheral suppliers based in Shropshire, UK. To access a comprehensive online shop of original and re-manufactured ink cartridges please visit http://www.mega-office.co.uk

We’ve all been there. You’re in the middle of printing out an important document and your printer suddenly stops. It’s the dreaded “out of ink” message. So you pull your backup ink cartridges out of your desk drawer and replace them. Wishful thinking, right?

Most of us just don’t plan ahead — no matter how many times this has happened to us. When we buy ink cartridges, we tend to just get one set of black and color cartridges. The cost of ink is so high that buying more than one set is just too expensive for most consumers. Thankfully, there are less expensive options out there – and you don’t have to sacrifice quality.

Option 1 – Avoid Staples, Best Buy, and other large retailers altogether. You’re never going to get a good deal on ink cartridges since they only sell name brand replacements. Instead, do your homework on the internet. There are many reputable websites out there that charge up to 80% less for cartridges.

How is that possible? Rather than selling name brand replacements, online ink retailers sell compatible and remanufactured cartridges. There cartridges are technically just as good as the originals, and can be purchased for half as much money. As an added precaution, however, we recommend buying ink cartridges at sites that offer 100% guarantees. In the online world, you never know what you’re getting. My advice — run a search on Yahoo for “ink cartridges.” Visit the first 5 sites. Find the web site that offers the best prices, lowest shipping costs, and a 100% guarantee.

Option 2 – Refill your ink cartridges. It’s not as bad as you might think. And best of all, this is definitely the cheapest way to go. You can fill your ink cartridges up to 10 times with a single ink refill kit. There is obviously some work to this. You basically use a syringe to inject ink back into your original cartridges. If you do this correctly, this is no spillage, and you’ll be up in running in no time. It takes a bit of practice to master the art of refilling ink cartridges. Don’t get discouraged if it takes a couple of tries before you get it down.

Bill Smith is a printer expert who has specialized in ink cartridges and refill solutions for over 5 years. Visit his site at http://www.buythebestbuy.com.

This article series will be broken down into the following sections: Processor and Memory, Hard Drive and Multimedia Drives, Audio, Video, and Graphics, Data Fax and Modem, and Ports.

These articles are about the components of the Compaq Presario SR1617CL-B; however, the knowledge you gain from these articles will equip you to make better buying decisions regarding any home desktop computer purchase. I will also add information and tips about computer components that are not in the Compaq Presario so that you have a solid understanding and that you are equipped to do good comparisons when shopping.

Hard Drive and Multimedia Drives: First of all, the hard drive type used most in home computers is the ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) drive (better known as the IDE drive). This drive type has a 16 bit parallel interface and it supports up to 133MB/s data transfer rate. The version of ATA drive that supports this speed is ATA-7 and is the last drive of this type to be made.

When someone refers to a hard drive as an ATA drive, it is commonly a Parallel ATA hard drive. ATA hard drives are also often called IDE, EIDE, Ultra-ATA, Ultra-DMA, ATAPI, and PATA hard drives (each of these acronyms does imply specific details, but are commonly interchanged). Since the Compaq Presario SR1617CL-B uses a 160GB 7200RPM Ultra DMA hard drive, I will go into the specifics of Ultra DMA.

Ultra DMA can be best understood by breaking down its parts. DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. DMA allows the hard drive to send data directly to memory without visiting the processor (CPU). Since the CPU is busy doing all sorts of things, DMA increases performance by not having to wait on the CPU to get to the task. The Ultra in Ultra DMA means that the ATA transfer rate of 16.6 Mbytes/sec has been increased to 33.3 Mbytes/sec. There is an Ultra DMA hard drive that can transfer 133 Mbytes/sec and it is based on the ATA-7 standard and it can be found written as Ultra DMA-133 in desktop computer descriptions.

Therefore, if someone tells you that the computer you are buying has an Ultra DMA hard drive, make sure you ask if it is a 33,66,100 or 133 hard drive. The higher the DMA number the faster it can transfer data to the rest of the computer system. One last note Ultra ATA is the ATA hard drive standard developed by Intel, Seagate and Quantum for desktop computer systems.

In my next article of this series, we will move from the Ultra DMA drive to the workings of the SATA hard drive. Currently, the SATA drive is a little above the value priced range but as the popularity increases and the prices decrease the SATA will most certainly become the new standard.

Become A Student Of My FREE E-Course Entitled "Computing Success Secrets" at Computer Success Secrets

You’ll Receive a Steady Stream of Information Packed Lessons.

This "Living" Computer Course Feeds You The Important Tactics & Strategies That You Need To Survive In Our Computer Driven Society.

Olan Butler is the Chief Architect of BHO Technologists, a computer productivity & organization software and service provider http://www.bhotechnologists.com with headquarters in Kansas City.

If you run a small business, chances are you’re saving important files to a server. But what happens when disaster strikes? How are you ensuring that your files won’t be lost? Many people fail to realize that the loss of files could cripple their business. You can insure your office and equipment, but you can’t insure files. You can’t repair or buy back lost files. Ipso facto, they are lost!

This brings us to the concept of disaster recovery. What is disaster recovery? If you’re thinking that disaster recovery is about frantically trying to get back data that’s already been lost, then you’re already behind the 8-ball! Disaster recovery is about safeguarding your organization’s data so that it can be safely restored in event of a crippling disaster. And having an industry-standard file backup strategy is undoubtedly the most important part of disaster recovery.

What you have to do is ensure that all files on the server are backed up to another storage medium — tape, removable hard disk, NAS device, and so on. Most businesses choose to use tape. Let’s look at how you can set up a tape backup strategy for your own business.

1. Tape — the perfect backup medium

Isn’t tape an anachronism in the age of optical disks, removable hard drives and a plethora of whiz-bang, random-access storage media? Tape is indeed a dinosaur in relative terms, but it’s ideal for backup. Tape is slow, but can store a lot of data… one mid-range tape should be enough to backup your entire server. Plus, tape is extremely cheap — mid-range tapes cost around $20 each.

2. When should you backup?

Typically, tape backup is performed at the end of each day. Just put in the tape and let the backup process run overnight. If your server ever suffers a catastrophic disaster, you have at least saved all your files from the previous day.

3. Tape Rotation

The ideal tape backup solution would involve using a new tape for each backup. This means purchasing a new tape for every day of your business’s operations. This is hardly cost-effective for your business. Tape is cheap, but not that cheap!

This is why we speak of tape rotation. Tape rotation means to reuse tapes from previous backups. The simplest tape rotation scheme is to have one tape for each day of the working week. Tapes are labelled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

You can restore data from any one of the tapes in your library, or in this case, any day in the past the week. This strategy requires only five tapes, but only provides one week’s data backup history.

4. Grandfather-Father-Son — A Case Study

The grandfather-father-son schedule is the most widely used method, and involves backing up data in the following way:

* daily — on the "son tapes"
* weekly –- on the "father tapes"
* monthly -– on the "grandfather tapes"

This system is far more powerful than the five-tape rotation, but requires more tapes.

This strategy provides you with the ability to restore data from the last week, plus any Monday over the last month, plus any month for as many monthly tapes as you have. Variations on this scheme are available, and provide a trade-off between the number of tapes required, and the number of monthly tapes available.

5. Different types of backup

Different types of backups are available in backup software.

* Full — all files, system data
* Differential — all files added or changed since the last full backup
* Incremental — all files added or changed since the last full, differential or incremental backup
* Daily — all files added or changed on the day of the backup

A Full backup will copy all files and system data to the backup media. It allows for the complete restore of all data from one single tape.

Differential, Incremental and Daily are partial backups are designed to reduce amount of data backed-up to the media, resulting in faster backups. To restore data using one of these backups, the last Full backup tape will also be required, along with any other partial backups since the last Full backup.

6. Tape backup software

At this point you may be thinking that performing tape backup is a complex task. Tape rotations, incremental backups… sure, you can try to do this manually, but this would make the backup process hiddeously difficult and prone to human error! The solution is to invest in a good piece of server backup software that will manage and schedule your tape backups for you.

What should you look for in tape backup software? For many small business owners, the price is crucial. Many brands of backup software are just too expensive — in the $1000+ range — and contain features that you’ll never need. Look for a backup utility that’s designed specially for small business instead. It should be simple-to-use, reliable and affordable. Choose a good tape backup software and you’ll be well on your way to safeguarding your files and data.

Linus Chang is a backup expert and the lead developer of BackupAssist– backup software that is simple and affordable, and perfect for small and medium businesses. Protect your Windows servers, including SQL Server and Exchange Server, to tape, REV drive, hard drive, NAS and more, at a fraction of the cost of other backup programs. Designed as a fix for NTBackup bugs and issues.