We forgot to say "Happy Improve Your Office Day!" (and a review of my new Lenovo e420s laptop)

Wow, I feel like such a toad.  I forgot to wish everyone a very happy "Improve Your Office Day" on October 4th this year.

Really, it's an official sort of official holiday!  Check it out yourself - http://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/improve-your-office-day/

Well, probably that's because my new Lenovo E420s laptop hadn't shown up yet, and John and Harold's had.  I admit, I was a grump.

Well, I got mine a week later, and I have been loving it.   For the life of me, I can't figure out why I waited so long to get a new laptop.   As a techie, you'd think I'd be all about trying out the latest toys, the newest gadgets.

Strangely enough, though, I'm a late adopter of new toys.   I have some personality flaw that makes me like to keep what I've got working for as long as I can.   Perhaps it's inherited from parents that lived through WW2 and got ingrained with "Fix it up, wear it out" mentalities.

Anyway, so here I am, 2 weeks later, and I have to say, this is my all time favorite laptop yet.

The Lenovo e420s is now officially on my list of things I love.

A quick run-down of my favorite features, in non-techie language:

• $799 list price
• Intel Core I5 CPU (FAST!  Windows 7 sees 4 cores)
• 4 gb ram
• 320 gb hd
• Light weight
• Big keyboard
• Big monitor
• Fingerprint security (ie, it can log you in with a finger swipe)
• High resolution camera & good microphone (just hosted a webinar today, they were perfect for the job)
• A LIGHT at the top of the LCD monitor that you can turn on when typing at night (using it right now - it's very effective!)
• Bluetooth
• HDMI video output.

Anyway, look, here's the moral of the story....   I was tinkering along with a great computer that is about 5 years old before this that was awesome when I got it, and still runs Windows 7 fine, but good grief this new laptop is WWWWAAAAY faster, tons more features, and it was cheap!

So here's the deal....    As a business owner, I try to be cheap.   Don't you?   Instinctively, we want to keep expenses down.   Which means employees don't really need anything faster than that dinosaur of a computer you bought sometime during President Clinton's 2nd term, right?

WRONG.    They're wasting your time and your money using that dog.   Not intentionally.   But the time it takes for them to wait for it to boot, wait for print jobs, wait for reports, etc, etc, etc, is time not making you money.   It's time they could be spending helping your customers.

Instead, what are they most likely doing?   Telling your customers they're having computer problems.

So take a minute, go around your office and figure out how old your computers all are.  

HERE'S A GOOD RULE OF THUMB that's held true for the last decade....   for most office workers, if their computer is:
 ..... 5 years old or older, replace it now.
 ..... 4 years old, put it on next years' budget.
 ..... 3 years old, evaluate if it's a truly business critical machine - chances are there's no warranty on it anymore, and you either want to increase your backup routine on it, extend the warranty on it, or move the computer to a non-critical position in your business, and get this employee a new or newer computer.

If you're of the mindset that your staff should run their computers until the monitors melt, you're saving pennies  & burning dollar bills.   Oh, and you're probably really ticking off your employees.  Check out this recent survey from Staples.... http://investor.staples.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=96244&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=1612573

So that's all for now.   I am loving this Lenovo e420s laptop, and hope to have many happy years of use out of it.

But not too many....