My 6-month old Acer Timeline is giving me a problem with the screen. The screen’s colours are distorted. It’s quite a disappointment as it’s only 6 months old and I don’t expect to have such a problem. My previous Acer Aspire laptop had screen problems too but that was after some years of use.

Wonder if Acer generally has a weaker screen since both my Acers had problems albeit not the exact same problem. Now I have to send the laptop in to be serviced so I’ll have to suffer downtime for a few days at least. It’s truly an inconvenience as the laptop is my main source of doing business. Even backing up the files I need to be used on another PC is quite a hassle because there’s so much to back up. Now I understand why companies use virtualization services, to avoid this kind of downtime if one PC goes down. But as an individual, the only affordable way is to do manual back-ups.

Anyway, I better get started on it as this baby has to go for service in a few hours already…it will be missed deeply!

Meanwhile, anyone has any great recommendations for a laptop? I may want to stop using an Acer altogether…

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We’ve got a printer that’s functioning as a scanner, copier and printer. Been useful thus far but I’ve to admit that it’s a rather big machine. We thought of getting one that’s smaller, just for printing job. A smaller printer definitely helps to save space. I’ve not shopped in this area for a long time, so not sure what brand is a recommended one. Any suggestions, anybody?

Whilst I was just doing a quick search on this topic, I also came across something which I thought was neat for my little business, the epson tm-t88iv printer. It prints receipts and all, so saves the hassle of doing the manual way to write. But this buy is only a KIV case. I don’t need it right now, just neat to have.

So I’ll just search for a normal printer first. It doesn’t really cost much, I believe. Just want to get one that’s small in size but reliable in its functionality. What’s a good choice, Canon, HP, Epson?

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Since this blog of mine reviews quite a number of things, I thought I’d do one for online education too. I used to work in a company that was providing online education to various groups of people, from children to adult learning. So I’m a big advocate of online learning. However, at that time we were a little too early in bringing such services to the market as the people and infrastructure were not yet ready for such a change.

Now, it’s a different story. Not only are companies adopting online training courses and children actively learning online even at schools, people can also can get an online degree. And these facilities are a lot more acceptable by the market now than before. It’s deemed as a convenient way to achieve the means of getting a qualification, especially for those who have time and financial constraints in attending a physical university to achieve what they desire.

One of the online universitites that I’ve come across is a non-profit online university called Western Governors University. It offers a suite of courses to pick from and it is amongst one of the more affordable ones. From training to be in the teaching profession to being a professional in business and even in information technology as well as the health industry, you can find these diverse offerings at this online university. Not bad, huh?

What is your perception of getting a degree without having to step into a campus? You know, seeing how things have evolved, it won’t be surprising to see that this will be the norm in our society come 2 to 3 generations down the road. You reckon?

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Strange to be talking about seo software in a shopping blog, huh? You see, I recently received some emails from some of you who visited my blog from doing searches online. I must say that I was thrilled when these visitors wrote to me asking which SEO software I use since this blog seems to do quite well in a few things they were searching for. So I thought I’d take this shopping experience a little further by touching on technology and the internet too.

Honestly, I don’t use any fancy SEO tools, just some basic free plugins. I have not shopped for SEO softwares before, but if anyone who’s reading this has some great recommendations, it would definitely help for the visitors who asked the question.

I have browsed just casually about and saw many companies offering this service but howdo you know which is better? The price of one company to another also differs by a lot, some in the hundreds and some into the many thousands of dollars. How do you shop for THE one?

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Recently I wrote a post asking for recommendations for a good business card scanner. At that time I was exploring a brand called PenPower WorldCard which costs nearly RM500. And then I found that most shops don’t carry the brand but they carried one called Plustek OptiCard which costs around RM300. But since the former came highly recommended, I didn’t think Plustek would measure up.

Not so willing to spend RM500 at the same time, I thought I’d look for an alternative and see what others are recommending. No one provided me with anything and I proceeded then to give Plustek a try. I bought the Plustek OptiCard 820. I’m happy to say that it works just fine and I’m completely happy with it. Read below on what this business card scanner can do and how well it’s been working for me.

I like the sleek look of this scanner!

The Plustek OptiCard 820 model is a colour scanner and can fit up to an A6 paper size. I don’t know exactly know how big an A6 paper is but I’m guessing it’s the size of a standard photograph. You see, apart from scanning business cards, this scanner can also scan photographs.

There are 2 types of scans you can perform, one being an image scan and the other a text scan. For the scanning of business cards, obviously it is better to use the text scan. Once scanned, the colour image of the card is stored along with the extracted information on the card. The extracted data like name, company, telephone number, address, etc are automatically filled into columns for you, much like a spreadsheet on Excel. All these are stored in a software that comes with the scanner.

You can also specify that the same information be stored on an Excel spreadsheet so that you can do data sorting or create a database if you so wish. Very convenient, very easy. You can also opt to have the scanned business card stored directly in your selected email application like Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook. They will be automatically stored into your Contacts folder in the email application. Easy and fast!

On the usage of the scanner itself, it is quite idiot-prove. The device comes with an installation CD that contains some complementary softwares that work with the scanner. All you need to do is to install them all. As for the setting up, it’s not much work, really. Each time you want to perform a scan, just press the buttons on the scanner and determine whether it’s going to be an image or text scan and it will do the rest to store the results automatically for you.

You can do the scan document by document or you can do continuous scans if you have a few at a time to scan through. Just keep feeding the device with the documents before you open them up in batch to view. It’s also quite quick to have a business card scanned through. I scanned some 200+ business cards in about 30 minutes or so.

The Plustek OptiCard doesn’t need to be plugged into a power adaptor to be used. Just connect it to your computer via the USB hub and it will power up. It is also quite small in size and of reasonable weight, so it’s very portable as well. It comes with a pouch to be stored in so that you don’t get dust settling on the device and therefore compromising the scan results.

As you can tell, I’m very happy with the performance of this business card scanner and it has totally met my needs. Retailing at RM299, this business card scanner is really worth it for me. So if you are looking for an affordable scanner like this, you can give this brand and model a try.

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