M. David Stone

If your company has decided to focus on sustainability, you’re almost certainly including green criteria in your buying decisions for IT hardware. Odds are you’ve set requirements for things such as energy use and recyclability-specifying that all new desktop systems meet Energy Star requirements, for example, or that the manufacturer provide a recycling program. That’s […]

For companies and IT departments that take green issues seriously, printers deserve special attention. In addition to the questions you might ask about any IT equipment — from power use to the potential for recycling or reusing the material in the equipment itself — there are a slew of issues specific to printers and to […]

The first thing a business discovers when it decides to pursue green IT and build an energy-efficient IT infrastructure is that making the decision is easier than figuring out which servers, storage and virtualization products will actually use less heat, cut a company’s energy bill and reduce its carbon footprint. The good news is that […]

Choosing a video and slide projector for permanent installation in a corporate boardroom or conference room is different from picking a mobile laptop projector for, say, road warriors to stash in their luggage. Choosing a video and slide projector for either the conference room or a mobile laptop projector still requires an eye for resolution […]

Think of a business projector and you probably picture a typical front-projection setup in a conference room, with the projector mounted on the ceiling, or perhaps sitting on a table or desk, projecting the image from a spot somewhere in front of the screen. There are other options, however. It’s well worth knowing about them, […]

Computers are all about information: creating it, manipulating it, retrieving it and, above all, storing it. That makes storage, and more particularly hard disks, the most critical element of any computer system, a statement that holds true whether the drives are on the corporate desktop or function as shared storage on a company network, alone […]

Choosing the right printer is hard enough when you have all the information you need. It gets harder when manufacturers tout printer specifications that don’t tell you what you need to know. Here are some specs to be wary of and others you should ask about, even though manufacturers tend to skip them. Laser Speeds […]

Specsmanship is a time-honored game that marketing departments like to play. But there are times when they take the game so far that the specs don’t mean very much. Consider, for example, these common scanner specs that are widely misused and widely misunderstood. DPI or PPI? References to scanner resolution are almost always in dots […]

Penny Wise, Printer Foolish: 10 Ways Not to Save Money on Printing Penny Wise, Printer Foolish: 10 Ways Not to Save Money on Printing – Pick a Printer by Price Faced with a choice of two printers, both of which give you acceptable speed, quality, paper handling and other features, it may seem obvious that […]

Laser vs. Inkjet Printers: The Blurring Lines Print SpeedAdvantage: Laser Rated speeds suggest otherwise, but lasers generally have a tremendous speed advantage over inkjets. The simple truth is that the ratings for the two technologies are not comparable. You can count on a 30 ppm (page-per-minute) laser to print text pages at close to 30 […]