Cover Story: 51 Ways to Save Money

Times are tough. And you do not need us to tell you that. The signs are all around you. Your budgets have been cut, and you are under pressure to save even more. One way is to cut investments. But that can have long-term negative implications that you would rather not have. So, how do you tighten your belt without sacrificing productivity and quality? This is where your IT setup should come to your aid. You should be able to leverage your IT infrastructure to deliver savings not only in IT itself, but also in other areas of your business. In this issue, we outline 51ways to save money. Some of them lead to direct savings of expenditure. Some of them will help you to defer investments for some more time. And some will help you to improve productivity all around. It is one thing to advise, and yet another to practice what you preach. Let us begin with what we are preaching. Let us keep this introduction brief, saving your time (and also some paper).

Use Free Net Storage Space

Download mail manually

Avoid sending attachments

Update anti-virus software

Create Folder shortcuts

Share CD drives

Turn off animation

Enable DMA

Reduce start-up time

Buy MFDs

Use mail poppers

41. Use Free Net Storage Space
Websites like free-drive.com provide free, but limited, storage space on the Net, which means you can access your data no matter where you are, as long as you have a Net connect. You won't need to carry media like Zip drives and CD-ROMs. Freedrive.com offers TestDrive membership plan where you can get 5 MB of hard drive space, plus several other goodies like a photo album, FD chat, and CD burning. Others like Xdrive.com have now become paid services.

Save: Effort required to copy information on storage media, and recall it; and cost of media

42. Download mail manually
Configure your e-mail client to check for mail after a long interval, instead of at a default one minute. To set the time interval in Outlook Express, go to Tools>Options>General and select the check box Check for new messages every and enter the time interval in the list-box here. Better still, disable this feature, and download mail manually when you need to.

43. Avoid sending attachments
Instead of attaching text-based documents to your mail, if they're brief copy-paste them in the main message itself. Attachments take up more bandwidth and in the case of Word documents have long headers that take longer to download. By avoiding them, you save on bandwidth on your and the receiver's end. In fact, you don't have to send an attachment to someone in your office. Instead, copy the attachment to a shared directory on your network, and send the location of this file to the recipient.

44. Update anti-virus software
Regularly download anti-virus definitions and vaccines in one location, distribute them locally through your Intranet, and make sure that all staff update their definitions. This will ensure that you don’t lose data due to a virus attack.

45. Create Folder shortcuts
Rather than going to a sub-folder within a folder to open a file, create shortcuts to folders on your desktop. Right-click the folder from your Windows Explorer and select Create shortcut to place a shortcut on your desktop.

46. Share CD drives
If some machines in your office have CD drives, share these between all machines. Or, install a CD drive on your central server and share it.

Images, sound, and animation files take long to download, and hold up other information. Turn them off for Web pages to download faster. Turn them on for websites that put further links inside images.

48. Enable DMA
Enabling DMA (Direct Memory Access) allows for direct transfer of data between the hard drive and RAM, leaving the CPU free for other tasks.

To enable it in Windows, go to your system properties from the Control Panel, and to your hard drive’s properties. If it’s not already checked, tick on the DMA option here, and restart your system. Also, most motherboards today come with DMA drivers, so make sure you install them.

Remove applications like instant messengers, display card utilities, or QuickTime Player from start-up. Start these when necessary and exit them completely, instead of leaving them active on the system tray. Some ways of preventing unnecessary items from loading at start-up: Most of these applications will appear in your system tray. Right-clicking on an application icon will bring up a ‘Settings’ menu with a Disable option or the ‘Disable’ option itself; clicking on this will prevent the application from starting at boot time and hogging system resources in the background. In the Windows Startup Group folder, which contains the shortcuts for items loading at start-up, delete shortcuts of applications that you don’t want to load. All applications have lots of entries in the system registry, which makes the registry unnecessarily large and adds to the boot up time. Use a tool like RegCleaner to clean the ‘dead’ entries from your registry. For Windows NT and 2000 systems, disable system services that the server runs but which you don’t need. However, get appropriate amount of documentation on what each service does before you disable it. Also, speed up system performance by removing heavy screensavers and pictures on the desktop.

Save: Time for PC start-up and loading of applications; resources hogged by applications running in background

50. Buy MFDs
Instead of a photocopier, printer, scanner, and fax, opt for a multi-function device. Save on space taken by multiple devices, say if you run services like printing, copying, and faxing. MFDs (starting from Rs 24,000) have a cost benefit only if you include the cost of a photocopier. You can get a printer, scanner, and fax machine
for less than Rs 10,000.

51. Use mail poppers
Instead of using a standard e-mail client like Outlook Express or Eudora, use e-mail popper programs. These are small utilities, from a few kB up to 2 MB in size, that can do many useful things, like inform you every time you have new mail, or download all your mail headers. Search for the string ‘e-mail poppers’ on Google and you’ll find tons of such free programs.

Save: Internet bandwidth; time; system resources (as they take up very little memory space)

Anil Chopra, Anuj Jain, Ashish Sharma, Juhi Bhambal, Krishna Kumar, Neelima Vaid,
Pragya Madan, and Sachin Makhija