As the average number of PC and laptops per house and/or office continues to rise due to the need for IT and the affordability of hardware, a new headache soon arises, which is that of software licensing. Microsoft is the undisputed market leader in the industry with their ’Office’ suite, and whilst having it on a single computer is affordable, if your home or business has 3+ computers, then the costs start to rise.

If you find yourself in this situation or are currently hindering your productivity by not having the software you need available on multiple computers, then maybe we have found the answer for you!

Open Office 2, click here for info,  is a completely free Office Suite which has been in existence for 20 years, and the license agreement also allows for free commercial use.

In a review of Open Office 2 by PC Pro magazine, their reviewer concluded: “OpenOffice certainly doesn’t lack features compared to the market leader, and most of its ease-of-use issues stem from people’s familiarity with Microsoft Office rather than an inherent problem with the program itself. As such, you should certainly try OpenOffice’s offering before donating another UKP100 or more to Microsoft’s coffers. After all, it’s free.”

Open Office 2 includes word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation, drawing and math applications and is compatible with the file formats of all the major competing products.

With such a great feature list, established userbase, and amazing price, we feel it’s really worth taking a look at Open Office 2.

Jettec has recently redesigned its packaging for many of its remanufactured cartridge range.

The packaging incorporates stronger communication of the cartridge part code, and is part of Jettec’s “Live it. Print it.” campaign.

We have just received a new shipment from Jettec and several cartridges have arrived in their new packaging. As our stocks of the old style packaging deplete and Jettec convert their entire range to the new packaging, we will start shipping the new styles.

We currently stock part of the Jettec remanufactured cartridge range, a long with the brand Xprint. We are evaluating the quality and reliability of both brands with a view to selecting a preferred partner in the future, and will either stock dual brands or move entirely over to one of the brands.

Epson has recently launched a new inkjet printer model, the D88+.

The Epson Stylus D88 Plus printer is the simple way to print all your documents and photos, while keeping costs low. With the latest ink technology, the award winning Micro Piezo print head for better quality printing, and individual, low-cost ink cartridges, this printer delivers a lot more for much less.

Available for around £59.99 (see Currys), this model is economic to buy and also uses one of Epson’s more economic series of cartridges, T0611-T0614, which we offer along with compatible offerings from both Inkrite (PhotoPlus Range) and Xprint.

Main features of the printer are A4 borderless photo printing, text print speeds of upto 23ppm, seperate colour inkjet cartridges and connection via USB and Parrallel Port.

Probably every Internet user is suffering from dealing with ‘Spam’ on a regular basis. Seems like officials in the USA have finally started to take some action, as one of the largest known culprits of spam email has been arrested, and could face upto 65 years in prison!

We have recently been working on new systems to eradicate spam at Calibre, but one thing we never do is actually click on links contained in Spam email, and have always thought that this would be the case for all Internet users that receive Spam.

That’s why we were staggered to read that this Spam King has managed to earn £773,000(£391,000) from his spamming activities. No wonder we all keep receiving so much Spam!

Our advice to all email users is not to click on Spam email. Even though many are just annoying advertisements for products and services you have not requested, they are also one of the primary methods for Virus’s, Malware and Spyware getting onto computers.

I was talking to a friend from over at New Media Fusion, who happened to send me a link for an online backup service he had been reading about. See www.carbonite.com.

From hearing many horror stories over the last 10 years about people who never backup their data and then having a hard drive failure or computer theft, I know very well that it’s one area of computing that people still neglect with dire consequences. Imagine the pain of loosing years of digital photo’s or years of college work.

This service is USA based but it is fantastic value. For $49.95 a year (around £27) you get to backup EVERYTHING from your PC or laptop in REALTIME (as long as you are connected to the Internet). This means that as you work on your computer, the Carbonite software which you install will monitor your hard-drive for new/updated files. When it finds them it instantly updated the online version of the file or adds a new file.

There are features to restore files if you loose them or delete them by accident and there is no limit to the storage volume. So even if you have a wonderful new computer and have filled up the 400gb hard-drive with iTunes music, it will keep a back-up of it all.

For those of you using your computers for more serious stuff, like work!, it keep a backup of all those important files, like quotes, invoices, accounting data, contracts, spreadsheets, business plans etc etc.

No more having to worry about remembering to copy some files to a disk or USB stick on a Friday, and if you’re one of those who still does not backup your data, this service could literally save your professional life if anything bad did happen with your hard-drive.

I think this is a fantastic service at a bargain price, and even though we regularly backup all our data to external hard-drives and take them off-site, I am going to sign us up for the service so our server will remain in a backed-up state 100% of the time, even if we forget to do our own in-house back-ups.

Welcome to our blog. If you’ve dropped on by from one of our inkjet sites, then thanks for taking a look.

We have decided to start blogging as the world of printing, ink and general home and soho use technologies are changing so quickly, we thought it would be a good way of communicating with our customers and visitors about a variety of topics which we feel will be of interest.

This will include news on new printing devices, other useful technologies, software which might be of use, and maybe reviews of services and products which fall outside our current business operations, but which we feel are genuinely useful and worth taking a look it.

We look forward to having you along as regular readers in our blogging activities.