In honour of earth day we thought we’d revisit the topic of going paperless. When computers were first entering the business world we were all promised the end of paper as we knew it. However as we all know, paper use is greater now then it has ever been in the past.

Conficker is not a new virus. It first appeared in late 2008, but has recently received a lot of hype including a feature on 60 minutes on March 29th, 2009. The hype is mostly because there are some unknowns about the virus and because some estimates put the number of infections as high as 15 million PCs. According to Symantec less then 1% of the total infections are in the US. Approximately 29% of infections are in China, followed by Argentina, Brazil, Russia, and India.

Have a look on your PC right now down on the right by the clock. How many icons are there? Did you know that EACH of those icons is taking up CPU power and slowing your computer down? Do you really need them to be running all the time?

You can often gain a significant performance increase just by preventing programs from starting up and running in the background.

Change the Philosophy from fire fighting to fire prevention. There’s no question that waiting until something breaks and having an emergency on your hands costs more. When you add up lost work from downtime, emergency service costs, rash decisions, expensive hardware, band aid solutions, not to mention the stress, planning your upgrades before the technology fails is far less expensive.

Mentioned in another blog post by DigitalFire Inc., Software as a Service and Open Source software can really revolutionize small business. The quality of software that the small business owner has access to is truly incredible these days. We’ve collected a few of our favourites here but there are many many more.