Small Business

Welcome

Talk-PC supplies bespoke computer solutions to support the small business. If you are a small business, club or hobbyist, undoubtledly you either own a computer or have access to one.  What is becoming increasingly apparent is that whilst the processing capability of computers has increased phenomenally, our real use of that capability has not kept up.  Whilst new Operating Systems and the latest versions of the large product sets, such as Office or Sage require more memory to run and faster CPU's, their needs are more than adequately met by most of the standard computers that you buy online or down the high street.  Whilst writing this website now, using Microsofts Visual Studio 2005 product (A hefty 3.2GB installation size and one of the more resource intensive products around), my oldish 2Ghz laptop is not really ever reaching more than 10% CPU usage.  You are most likely to have a computer or network of computers that is highly underused resource wise.  There is an old adage that Diesal engines perform best when they are working at 100% (cant remember source at present), though the same thoughts do not directly apply to computers, to have a machine on your desk that is "idling" at between 5 and 10% utilisation you ought to ask yourself a couple of simple questions:
  • Do you write the occasional official letter on it?
  • Do you browse the Internet on it in your spare time?
  • Do you check your emails using it?
If you can answer yes to any or all of the above, then you are probably amongst 95% of computer users worldwide that do not take real advantage of their systems.

Ask yourself another question
  • Is there any part of my day to day job that if I had the knowledge, I would automate?
 I expect if you really thought about it, the answer would be yes.  A few examples:
  • You have customer names and contact details in an excel spreadsheet.  Can you or all your colleagues draft a letter and have it sent to all (or more importantly a subset) of those customers automatically?
  • To Invoice customers, where is the information held?  On a Paper filing system? using unmanaged word documents? in an Access database?  Can you re-generate the Invoice if required? can you see a history of ammendments to the Invoice? Can you perform metrics on all (or subset of) Invoices, such as total sales, total VAT, best selling items, least selling items?
  • Do you already have a database held on a local server using Access that is used by your employees.  Would it benefit you to be able to have this information at your fingertips from home, work or wherever you are in the world?
Back to Talk-PC. My products are the design, implementation and support of bespoke small business solutions to support your business. Please have a look at my offerings in the areas of websites, software solutions and services.  I would like to hope that you would be presently surprised in how the increase in computer capability has coincided with a dramatic drop in the cost of software development, due primarily to a reduction in Website hosting costs coupled with an increase in developer productivity toolsets.

I am based in Warminster, Wiltshire and work as a IT Consultant for a UK consultancy, specialising in System Design and Application Architecture.  I am fully Microsoft Certified (MCSD.NET) and utilise the very latest technologys for product design, code, test and deployment.

I can be contacted on Warminster (01985) 216351 or email Mike@Talk-pc.co.uk.  Please dont hesitate to get in contact if you wish an informal chat on how we may be able to use advances in modern technology to increase your productivity. 

Mike Read
(MCSD.NET)