The IT hardware refurbishment industry is expecting a purple patch over the next few years, as businesses look to avoid paying top dollar for new kit.

However, there has always been the perception that the goods could be in some way inferior, destined to break within ten minutes of use and come with a liberal sprinking of breadcrumbs from the previous user’s lunch. Happily, in these belt-tightening times, this could not be further from the truth.

Refurbished equipment is generally around 1-2 years old, with any worn parts replaced, so something like a desktop or server would be perfect to run most business applications smoothly for the next few years. More specific hardware, such as tape backup drives, can be older but coming from a corporate environment are still more than enough for most medium sized businesses.

The best news is that refurbished equipment comes with several months of warranty to protect your purchase; if something is going to go wrong it will usually happen sooner rather than later, and in the price - you can expect a 33% - 50% discount over buying new equipment.

Priority One have an extensive network of refurbished equipment suppliers, and also procure new equipment at sub-retail rates should this be needed. Let us know your requirements and find out how much you could save on your next IT purchase.

Virtualise (verb); ‘The act of consolidating two or more servers on to one physical piece of hardware’

If you are running multiple servers with just one or two services on each server, it is probably safe to assume that your servers are not working to their capacity, which leads to poor efficiency and wasted running costs.

Servers require a great deal of power, an ever expensive commodity, so if you have the chance to reduce your active operational hardware while maintaining speed and perfomance it should defintely be something to consider.

Not only that, but some types of virtualisation - for example spreading 4 virtual servers across 2 or 3 physical servers, actually leads to a greater built-in redundancy. If one physical server fails the others take up the slack instantly

Priority One are experts in virtualisation. Call us today on 0845 0948 999 to arrange a free survey, and discover how much you could save on your operating costs while improving your IT resilience.

We are offering a pay-as-you-go iPhone 3G, complete with 1 year’s free internet browsing, to anyone who refers us to a company who then become a client. 

We are looking for companies with 10 to 200 staff who may be interested in the services of a forward-thinking, fantastic IT support company with a cost effective and superior support package.

You’ll receive your iPhone 3G as soon as one of your referrals signs up to our IT support services – simple as that.

So get thinking  and you could soon be enjoying the very latest iPhone!

Please also forward this information to anyone who may be interested in an iPhone. If you already have an iPhone 3G, then you can choose a Samsung 32 inch LCD TV instead!

Priority One are big fans of Microsoft Office 2007 - it’s a slick, well thought out product that delivers the goods. However, it’s not exactly cheap.

In the current climate many firms are re-evaluating exactly what they are getting from their IT budget, and there is a ready-made alternative to Office 2007 that could save you thousands of pounds in licensing - Open Office.

Open Office is an office suite that is totally free for any use, built in an open source environment, meaning that the source code has been added to and improved by many collaborators over time. The current release contains the following (MS Office / paid for equivalent in brackets) -

Writer (MS Word), Calc (MS Excel), Impress (MS Powerpoint), Draw (Adobe Illustrator), Base (MS Access)

The one application missing that you need from a standard Office package is an email client such as Outlook. Mozilla, who developed the FIrefox browser, created Thunderbird, the open source equivalent of Outlook - again free to download.

Get in touch if you’d like us to set up (free of charge) a demo PC with Open Office and Thunderbird for you to trial at your office - it could be the first step towards some big savings.

The latest must-have piece of hardware comes at an affordable price and, surprisingly, without an Apple logo in sight -  Netbooks (or ultra-small, low power laptops to you and me), are redefining the laptop market.

Latest models include the Asus eee PC 901, the Acer Aspire One and the MSI Wind - for in-depth reviews on each try here http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49297248-1,00.htm

Designed for ‘viewing not doing’ netbooks are great for email and web-browsing, displaying webpages in full screen - and are capable of video streaming too. Great for the Facebook generation who need to stay connected, but does this translate to business use?

In a word yes - but don’t expect to be editing PowerPoint email attachments anytime soon. Consider the netbook (with a 3G contract) a blackberry with a lot more clout and a proper keyboard, and you’re about there.

Definitely worth a look.

Two unconnected but concerning stories broke this week that made us sit up and take note.

Firstly, a man in the US was issued by his company with a laptop, that hadn’t been secured by antivirus, and was running a hidden trojan malware program. This particular piece of software downloaded images of child pornography, which were traced to the laptop. The man was fired, lost all his friends and endured a court case running for months, before his name was cleared.

Secondly, in the UK, a case of stolen bank details. A victim of online banking data-theft was told by the bank that due to a lack of updates on the victim’s antivirus software, the bank was not liable and would not be refunding any of the stolen money.

There are two measures that you can take to avoid either of these happening to you. Firstly, make sure you are running antivirus software on every one of your machines, with a regular update policy. Secondly, we would recommend using an online email filter such as Messagelabs, which keeps malicious emails and spam well away from your office in the first place. Priority One can advise on both of these; give us a call for more information.

It’s all too easy to justify the purchase of a new printer on the initial outlay - but what about the cost of running it?

For example, you can get a reasonable quality inkjet for around £50, but a reasonable laser printer costs three times much, around £150. For standard office use (ie no photo printing, 75% black and white, 25% colour), the laser printer quickly repays itself, at £7.50 per 1000 pages as opposed to around £70 per 1000 using the inkjet. The graph linked below shows at what point an inkjet becomes more expensive.

http://blog.priorityoneit.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/graph1.png

For an office printing more than a couple of thousand pages over the natural life of a printer (3 years), it makes sense to go with a laser, unless you need photo-quality or have heavy colour requirements. In this case it may be worth investigating solid-ink, get in touch for advice and information.

… goes to these jeans with a built-in rubber bluetooth keyboard. We just had to share these with you!

http://www.yankodesign.com/index.php/2008/04/22/beauty-is-skin-deep-geekness-is-to-the-core/

So far no-one at Priority One has come up with any reasonable (read printable) suggestions as to the actual point of these - answers on a postcard please…

The latest incarnation of the ubiquitous browser, IE8, represents a leap in functionality that you may wish to take advantage of. If you are responsible for your company website, click here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/features.mspx to download a beta version and see if your site is compatible.

The main differences are ‘activities’ - browsers can right click on content and sent it straight to Facebook / email / Digg, or bring up a map using just a postcode.

If your site is not compatible with IE8, don’t worry you won’t need to rewrite anything - you can add in a line of code that emulates IE7, to ensure that your site displays correctly.

Vodafone, O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Three… what’s the connection?

Yes, they all offer wireless broadband through an innuendo paradise called a dongle, and no, you’ll never realistically reach the advertised speeds from any of them.

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a closer look.

At first glance, Vodafone are offering the fastest service at 7.2 Mbps, twice as fast as the market. However, competitors claim that only ‘laboratory’ conditions are able to achieve these speeds, so you are perhaps better off looking at the data charges and working out the price plan for you - one woman recently came home to a bill for £3,000 for watching the Apprentice on holiday…

Wireless broadband is set to replace wifi as a convenience - there’s no longer the need to find a Starbucks if you need to check your email on the move, and as long as you limit your activity to email and the odd bit of browsing, it’s a very cost effective way of staying connected.