If It Prints, I'll Let You Know

The amount of paperwork a college student requires can be astounding, especially if you’re in a program that dwells mainly on research. Requirements such as your thesis, research papers, reaction papers, and manuals are the things that plague your daily life as a student, and your time can suffer for it. And sometimes, the professors don’t like having these computerized and prefer handwritten output because of the presupposition that it builds character.

Well, many of us students will probably not agree with our professors’ line of thinking, thus our increasing dependence on computer and printer usage. Let’s face it: A printer is not something that a student can live without, and it is often one of the many factors that can determine a ‘pass’ or a ‘fail’.

The first thing that students look for in their printers is their affordability. After all, it would be quite wasteful to spend money on a page that you will probably never see again. The important thing here is for the prints to be readable. If you think you don’t need all those new-fangled functions and doohickeys for your printing needs, stick to a cheap, reliable printer.

In this case, the emphasis is on quantity rather than quality. Printers used in the academic setting are primarily chosen for the number of pages that it can print, and not how high-resolution the prints come out. Chances are that you will print mostly text, and not pictures. Here, you’re probably better off buying a laser printer, which can print fast and can print a lot of pages for your money’s worth.

What about if you already have an inkjet printer and still want to save money while printing? Well, that’s easy. There are several generic brands in the market that are sold at relatively lower prices. Before buying though, make sure that the printer ink cartridge is compatible with your printer. Ask the sales staff or do a bit of research on it to confirm this before completing a purchase.

We have all heard the various ways to save money on printer ink and we’ve implemented them into our home and business printing practices. But what if that just isn’t enough? There is another interesting idea for users who want to save every little bit they can from their high-tech budget: Saving money by choosing an economical printer font; a font that uses less ink than others.

Saving money by changing your font isn’t just a theory. Research has shown that all users — individual printer users and small business environments — stand to save up to $80 a year per printer based on nothing more than changing the default font they use when they print documents. Which font is the most economical of them all? The aptly named Ecofont is designed to minimize ink and toner use, but there is actually one font that is even more toner friendly – Century Gothic. It covers the average sheet of paper with ink to a level of only 3.45% total ink coverage. By comparison, Arial, the most commonly used default font, averages 4.97% coverage. A burlier font like Franklin Gothic Medium hits over 5.5% coverage.

Even though these numbers may look miniscule they do still matter. The costs add up when you realize you may be using 60% more toner on every page you print than is really necessary. This isn’t even considering the reduction in the amount of paper used each month, thus saving more on that printing cost as well. And as always, one of the best ways to save on printing costs is to not print as much, of course. Deciding what is absolutely vital and eliminating superfluous printing can save on out of hand printing costs too.

Google has just released the code for the Chrome Operating System. The Chrome OS is currently available open-source via the Chrome OS project, and the development community has free and open access to it. Included are the current code base, user interface experiments as well as initial designs for ongoing development.

Google intends to have netbooks that are running the operating system available in the market just in time for the 2010 holiday season. When the Chrome OS does break into the market, “all activity will be stored in the cloud”. This was explained by Google product management vice president Sundar Pichai during a technical preview at the company’s headquarters.

What this means is that if for any reason you no longer are able to access your Chrome OS-based netbook (such as if you lose it), recovery of all information is possible as soon as the user will log in to a new machine.

There was no talk of dollars in Pichai’s part, but he did hint that the price range for the Chrome-based netbook will be within what one would expect from such a gadget. He did say, however, that they fully intend to come up with a netbook design that is slightly larger than usual in order to allow for a more convenient viewing and typing experience.

We will have to wait a year, though, for what this Google netbook would look like. But even this early, Google is already saying that they will not be stopping at just netbooks and eventually intends to expand to laptops and desktops.

Life is becoming more and more fast-paced, and traveling everywhere has become a common activity for the everyday businessman. The internet has allowed us instant access to our files, emails, and documents anywhere in the world, so long as the content is online. But printing is another matter. What if you need to print something quick and you only have your laptop with you at some remote place that time seems to have forgotten?

Fortunately for us, compact and portable printers have now been developed, and it becomes an easy task for us to print our files from anywhere in the world. These mini printers are often battery-operated, and can be carried in our laptop bags or even in our briefcases. It’s that convenient to have, especially during situations when you have to print a file that you need that very minute, and don’t have the time to run around and find a printer somewhere else.

One common disadvantage of mini printers is limited features. Some mini printers are built only for monochrome printing, while others are only for photo printing. It probably is still difficult to jam a lot of functions into something so small and compact. Looking at it from one perspective, that’s the trade-off for convenience and portability.

So if you don’t mind missing out on the other frills that big printers have to offer, mini printers can provide you with a basic solution to your printing needs. It’s small, light, and easy to carry, making it ideal for emergency printing situations. While mini printers are built mostly for a single type of printing, it is worth your money especially if you are a traveling businessman.

When we come to think of it, we may consider this period as the age of the laptops. This machine has, indeed, gone from being a convenient add-on gadget for the select few to being part of the mainstream. It is not uncommon for households to have more than just one laptop, and to see old desktops gathering dust in a corner.

Anyone who owns a machine or a gadget, however, has one thing to think about — reliability. Surely, no one will want to part with hard-earned cash to purchase something that will conk out in a day or two.

A feature on CNET.com discusses reliability, and how the various laptop brands fare against each other. Some of the data, indeed, came as a surprise; there are some brands out there that we thought could perform better. This information is nice to have before we head out for the shopping extravaganza of a lifetime on Black Friday.

The feature referred to a research paper released by the warranty firm Square Trade. They analyzed the failure rate for 30,000 laptops and compared the failure rates of various brands and hardware categories. According to the paper, over a period of three years, one out of three laptops is expected to fail; that is certainly a frequency that is surprising, and a bit concerning.

Leading the pack as far as reliability is concerned are Asus and Toshiba, which also surprised us somehow since we were not exactly too happy about our Asus. But then again, it was rather unfair for us to pit a Dell laptop against an Asus netbook, and the figures do speak for themselves.

Among the least reliable as far as the analyzed data was concerned were Acer, Gateway and HP; these three brands reportedly had higher than average failure rates.