Welcome back to the second edition of our newsletter in 2004. We hope the last one, and the ones to follow are informative to you and serve to quench some of the questions you ponder from time to time.

Our promotional placards, pictured above, have been extended indefinately. If you have one, or want one, please call 472-8936 or email info@busix.com and one will be delivered immediately. You will be eligible for up to 40% off a full year of our proactive maintenance services!

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to any interested parties or invite them to sign up HERE.

Q: What do you call a computer scientist?
A: It doesn't matter what you call him. He's too involved with the computer to come anyway.

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

March is upon us, and with it comes the infamous Spring Cleaning season. It seems common to clean out the closets and sort through items that have accumulated under the stairs; but what about your computers?

Whether at home, or in the office, all computers build up a large amount of very fine dust inside the case, power supply, and on the fans. While this is not usually noticed since the computer is tucked away under the desk and often isn't moved for months or even years, it does build up and provide a health hazard both you and your computer.

This dust can reduce the effectiveness of the case and CPU fans causing over heating. It will interfere with some contacts and plugs on drives and circuit boards. And worst of all, all this fine dust gets back into the air over time, making the allergy season attack people inside the office; we call it computer allergies.

How many bytes are there in one megabyte?

If you send an email to info@busix.com with the answer, you will receive the first month of any maintenance package for free! (Or the second hour of a consultation at no charge.)

Since the invention of addresses, people and companies have been sending unsolicited mail to them. While it may be common to dump a handful of "junk mail" in the trash each morning while reaching for the newspaper, you probably haven't noticed a garbage truck dumping a load of this junk mail there after a couple years.

With email, however, there might as well be a printing press right outside your door! In the last year alone, the portion of total email sent over the Internet identified as spam has risen from 42% to over 60%. At this rate of increase, you can expect spend a couple hours poking through all the emails, deleting the useless ones, and being careful not to delete the invitation to the company bar-b-que or staff meeting all at the same time. And how about those repetitive reminders that your friends are sending you infected emails?

Wouldn't it be nice if you could block all this junk mail before it ever reached your inbox, while still allowing everyone else's email to get through without complication? Which spam blocking program do you use though? As surely as spam has grown over the years, so have the number of good and bad tools to prevent it. Well we have evaluated a good number of the tools, and the best value we have found is McAfee SpamKiller.

You can purchase this software at any computer retailer and install it yourself by reading the manual and following the wizard, or you can have us purchase and install it for you on the spot. For all of our Total Assurance Package subscribers out there, installation and maintenance of this product is free. For the rest of you, learn how you can have this installed, maintained, and routinely updated for as little as $7.95 per month!*

*Note: Spam protection is a bundled service along with Spyware/Adware removal and requires the Peace of Mind subscription to access this low rate.)

Phone: (250) 472-8936
Email: info@busix.com
Website: www.busix.com

Call anytime to get a free analysis of your network complete with full colour report, fridge magnet, and 1hr consultation!

It seems more and more companies are offering rebates in the hopes that you'll buy their product over their competitors', and then either forget to claim the money, or lose the ambition to spend an hour clipping barcodes and filling forms only to receive a chocolate bar or so of value in return.

Some rebates have expiration dates that are very close the opening of the promotion. Others must be received, not just postmarked, by a certain date. And still, if you jump through all the hoops and do everything as requested; you won't see the check for a couple months on average.

PCWorld wrote a very informative article on this "Rebate Roulette", as they call it, in their consumer advice section. To read more, click here.

Would you rather drive in a boring car for 1000km on a tank of gas, or in a car with frills for 100km that has high repair costs?

With printers, this is almost the same idea, except there are reasons for doing both. In the above example, inkjet printers are the cars with frills, simply because they can print in colour.

Laser printers, the affordable workgroup ones anyway, only print in black and white, and fill the boring car role. However, a common laser print can do 4000 pages on a toner costing under $100, giving a cost per page of only 2.5 cents, and very infrequent toner refills which lowers hassle and the need to purchase 5 at a time.

Inkjets (or deskjets) on the other hand, can print in colour, but with the average blank ink tank around $50 yielding only 200-300 pages, the cost per page is in the 20 cent range. With most new printers, every time an ink tank is replaced, then heads must be re-aligned, and that's just not something we wake up excited to do every couple weeks. Now, when the once inexpensive printer breaks down, it is usually too expensive to fix and it gets replaced with another printer, costing more than similar repairs on a laser would be.

For times when infrequent colour prints are needed, but the majority of printing is done in black and white, use a laser and have an inkjet standby. If colour is something that can be done without, it is best to move to a laser printer and start saving time, money, and hassle.