I don’t usually talk about tax software, and I don’t use e-Record myself.

However, I stumbled across this announcement from the ATO (Australian Tax Office): e-Record

When I started Computer Aid, nearly 5 years ago, e-Record was almost the only free package available, but it didn’t suit my plans for the business, so I didn’t use it.

So why am I talking about it?

Well, after having worked on many hundreds of computers over the last 5 years, I’ve noticed that many people use e-Record.

In fact, I’d say that for every installation of commercial software like MYOB and QuickBooks, there is probably 5 to 10 installations of e-Record.

To me, that indicates that e-Record is a lot more popular than the ATO wants to admit. However, the ATO is withdrawing e-Record because “it’s no longer compatible with current commercial record-keeping systems”… and will need to be re-developed.

To me, it seems like they are saying: “we can’t import and/or export to other accounting software, and we can’t afford any further development of e-Record, so we will just drop it”.

In the future, it seems the only options available to people who are using e-Record, is to buy a commercial package.

There must be way to bridge the gap between the manual “pencil and paper” form of accounting, and the fully commercial accounting done by larger companies.

I’m now wondering: Does this mean people will just keep using the last (outdated) e-Record? Or will they go back to manual pen-and-paper accounting? Or does this mean MyYob and Quackbooks will get a sudden surge in the money flowing into their coffers?

Only time will tell…

PS: If you are looking for the most recent e-record, I have made a link to a version stored on my own server. You can find it in the comments below.

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Hints at 4:49 PM UTC

42 Comments »

I’ve seen many small businesses that don’t realise the best way to make backup copies of their computer data.

There are a few general problems with backups:

• Backup technologies keep changing… So using a tape backup might have been ok about 5 – 10 years ago, but not now.
• Some backup systems need manual input.
• Some backup systems store data in special / propriety formats… Making it difficult to restore without the appropriate software (which can be difficult to find during a computer breakdown).
• Backups are often stored together with the computers being backed up… Something like a fire can destroy the original data, and all the backups.
• Backups are rarely tested to see if they actually copy what they should.

With current technology, its easier to do correct backups, which are both easy to restore, and “fire proof”. This article doesn’t go into securing your data, but that can be added as an extra step.

Here is how to do it:

• Buy at least 3 external USB drives. Ideally, get at least a 320Gb external drives. 2.5″ drives are best, as they are lightweight, and use only 1 USB cable for both power and data. I like the seagate freeagent Go drives, but I avoid the supplied backup software.
• Download the free syncback backup software. Syncback will backup / synchronise your data, yet you can restore the data on any pc with a USB port.
• Install and setup syncback to sync the data between your pc and the external drive. How to do this depends on your specific circumstances and requirements.
• With 3 drives (A,B,C), rotate and backup the drives (daily), so that one drive is always off-site (eg at home).
• Every month or so, you can just double-click on the icon for the external USB drive, and navigate to a folder that you know contains recently changed files… open some of these files, and make sure they are as recent as you think they are.

If syncback is setup correctly, then the first backup can take a while (as the whole PC can be backed up at this time), but subsequent backups should only take 1 or 2 minutes, as only recently modified files will get copied.

Its also worthwhile excluding certain files from being backed up (eg hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys).

I’ll get into the details of setting up syncback in a future post.

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Hints, Technical at 4:12 PM UTC

1 Comment »

Sadly, stories like these seem to be all too common.

I was called out to a small company, as they seemed to be having ongoing computer problems.

Once on site, i would see the XP PC errors like:

• Invalid file structure.
• Applications suddenly shut down, displaying various error messages.
• Windows explorer would just freeze.

A scan with malwarebytes, can’t complete without some kind of lock-up.

While the scans are running, i ask a few more questions, and find that computerdrive.com.au have tried twice to fix the problem.

Initially, they scanned the drive for infections, fixed corrupted files, did various updates. The second time, they imaged the drive to a new drive. Once problems continued, the customer asked if they know what the problem is, and they admitted they didn’t know what was wrong, and could only suggest a new computer.

Back to the PC, i decided to eliminate any hardware problems.

I ran a simple RAM test, and everything seemed ok until the test did a block move… then the test gave an error. A few more tests showed that only 1 of the 2 RAM sticks was consistently faulty.

I replaced the RAM, and after a few more tests, i found no more problems.

Of course, i wonder why another computer company doesn’t have the tools to diagnose a problem that should be relatively easy to find… But then, in the last 4 years, I’ve seen many companies shut down after a year or two, and others just take any opportunity to milk customers who know little about computers.

Oddly, customers are also to blame… I’ve heard many of my own customers say (almost as soon as i walk in the door), that they know nothing about computers.

To the unscrupulous operator, its like saying: “please rip me off”.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 4:54 PM UTC

No Comments »

Since starting Computer Aid, I’ve suspected that online advertising is ineffective, when compared to most other industries.

The reason is quite simple: most people will call a computer technician once their computer is broken (or is so badly incapacitated, that it barely works).

So for most people, when the computer breaks down, they can’t use the internet to find a computer technician… so why advertise online for business if most of your target audience just can’t find you?

I admit, there are some people that will find a computer tech on the internet. These people will usually have a second computer, or another way to access the internet (mobile phone, work PC, friend, neighbour, etc).

I recently had Yodel Australia contact me, and they were very keen for me to give their online advertising (via google) a go. They were sure they would be able to deliver customers to my phone.

I was sceptical, since my own google adwords advertising campaign was resulting in hardly any “clicks”… which is good, in a way… as the advertising costs me next to nothing.

So they offered a special offer: they would not charge their fee for the first month… I would just pay for the google campaign itself (up front…).

When it comes to advertising, I’m willing to try new techniques, but I ruthlessly cull any advertising that doesn’t pay its own way.

Well, there was a slight hiccup during the first month… instead of targeting Sydney people who were looking for computer techs in Sydney, they targeted Brisbane people who were looking for computer techs in Sydney!

Needless to say, no-one clicked.

So, after fixing their mistake, Yodel ran the corrected campaign for a second month. Although I got a hard-copy performance report for the first (mis-managed) month, I got no report on the second “more successful” month.

Just a phone call asking if I’d like to continue the campaign, as the money is all used up, and I really need to run a campaign for at least 3 months in order to start seeing results…

Sorry Yodel: no results means you don’t get any more of my limited budget. I’ll go back to my own adwords campaign ($10 per month), rather than pay $200 per month for the same results.

So why do I continue to advertise, run a website, and keep writing these blog posts?

A few reasons:

• Brand awareness: If people see my website often enough (even if they fix their own problem with my information), they are more likely to call if/when they have a problem they cannot fix themselves.
• I enjoy writing
• Income: the tiny income from google adverts on computer-aid.com.au pays for hosting and domain names.
• It gives Computer Aid a professional and trustworthy “feel”. We all need to feel we can trust the people we hire to work for us (eg plumbers, builders, etc).

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 4:22 PM UTC

3 Comments »

I find I spend a lot of time “on the road”. Its the nature of a “to your door” computer service.

As soon as Computer Aid grew to having more than 1 person running the business, it became obvious that communication would be an important part of making sure everything ran like clockwork.

So for the past 3 years, me and my other half, have struggled with SMS, MYOB, and an awkward way of synchronising calendar and contacts between 2 Palm devices and MYOB…

Except for MYOB, I’ve found switching to a smart phone and google applications was a great solution.

In my case, I’m going with a windows mobile smartphone, but this could work just as well with the iphone, a blackberry, or an Android phone.

The “glue” that hold all this together is Google. I find it amazing that I can enter an appointment on google calendar, and if its a new customer, enter the details on google contacts… then the information quickly finds its way to any smart phone that I’ve setup for this.

On top of that, I can also check my google emails without needing to get to to office to read them.

And of course telephone and SMS are all well integrated, so I just need to lookup a contact, click on the phone number, and I’m dialling them. Quick and easy.

I would never have thought I could do all that, for free, without implementing an awkward outlook server system.

The smartphone also offers many other “features” that I probably won’t use (camera, mp3 player, messenger client, video player, games, spreadsheets, etc

Now I just need to get used to the “quirks” of windows mobile…

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Hints at 4:41 PM UTC

2 Comments »

A few weeks ago, I read a great article on how to make a company mission statement.

Take a look at seo review

Instead of the boring and meaningless one-liners that most companies use, this guy suggested something like a movie trailer.

So, following the cookie-cutter approach, I came up with a “movie trailer” for Computer Aid.

And it was real fun to make (even my wife had a laugh when I read it to her)

Now read this like you’re a movie voice-over guy:

In a town where computers slow down and freeze, one computer repairer comes to the rescue. When Internet connections fizzle and stop and all hope is lost, Computer Aid springs into action, and gets you surfing again. Computer Aid will impress you with their professionalism, experience, competence and efficiency. When things just don’t compute, someone can fix your computer and show you how to tame the internet.

You’ll laugh, when you see how easily they fix your problems. You’ll cry, when you realise you didn’t need to spend days trying to fix computer problems yourself.

Computer Aid: We can help you.

I was tempted to make the last line: Computer Aid: Coming soon to a theater near you!

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Humor, SEO at 4:11 PM UTC

2 Comments »

I recently heard of an interesting advertising company called exitjunction.

I liked the idea, as the advertising doesn’t take up space on my website.

The way it works is: someone finds your website via a search engine, they take a stickybeak, then decide to press the browser back button to look for something else. Instead of going back to the search engine, they get taken to an exitjunction.com advert page (that looks like search results).

At this point, you can either click on an ad, or you can click the back button once again, and end up back at the search engine.

Now, I did a bit of research, and I found some people saying it could interfere with google adsense. But nobody had any positive proof… it was all: “maybe”, “it shouldn’t”, “it might”.

OK, I’ll try it out.

I also decided to try out the new google youtube ads at the same time (I should know better by now: never do multiple changes, as you don’t know which one is causing the problem).

My adsense income is so low, that I figured that it won’t matter if I get penalised for a while.

At first, everything seemed fine, but after 6 days (15th Feb), I noticed a huge drop in traffic (from around 1,000 unique visits per day to about 500). See the graph:

I took a look at my website stats, and I could see that the traffic from google, yahoo and MSN search results, had dropped almost immediately after implementing exitjunction, but this drop was masked by an increase in direct and referred traffic (until all traffic dropped after 6 days). See graph:

So, I decided to take out exitjunction, and the search engine traffic started improving, but only slightly.

Luckily, the overall traffic didn’t drop to almost zero… thanks in large part to entrecard traffic… Thank you EntreCard!

Maybe it will take a few weeks for traffic to return to normal… I hope!

The income from people clicking on exitjunction ads was lower than what I get from adsense, so removing exitjunction was an easy decision.

I can only hope that at some point in the future, google and exitjunction will play together nicely. But for now, I’m putting exitjunction on the back burner.

Why does exitjunction affect search traffic?

Posted by Computer Help as Business, SEO at 4:46 PM UTC

7 Comments »

I find it amusing (and also annoying) that sale droids will call me offering great deals on internet and mobile phone.

So I tell them the truth: I currently spend less than AU$100 per year on my mobile (Virgin), and I get high speed ADSL2+ , 200Gb of downloads, for AU$80 per month (TPG).

Its amusing to hear them flounder for an explanation, and eventually admit that they cannot do better.

And the reason they cannot do better is that I’ve shopped around and deal directly with the ISP/phone company, while they have to pay phone consultants to drum up more business.

Otherwise, I like to string them along, as I mentioned in a prior post: annoying marketing phone calls

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Musing at 1:00 PM UTC

2 Comments »

I went to google today & saw an odd icon on my browser tab:

I think it looks awful.

It took me a long time before I realised its actually a white “g” on a colourful vomit background.

OK, personal artistic feelings aside, I also don’t like it from a marketing and branding point of view.

Most good marketing people know that you need to maintain consistency with your logo, and use it everywhere you can.

Mcdonalds is a good example. They use the golden arches everywhere (including their favicon).

I’ve tried the same with the Computer Aid logo (black name on a yellow oval, with a red oval border). For my favicon, I decided to only use the letters “CA”, since anything else would have been unreadable.

If I were google (don’t we all wish for that!), I would make use of their logo from their home page… but since its too big to fit into a favicon, then the first letter (maybe with a circle around it), would be the next best thing.

So, I would use the letter “G” (uppercase) as the favicon…

Hold on!

Thats what Google originally had as a favicon!

So, it looks like the new icon fails on a few fronts.

Even the slightly older small “g” failed, as they picked the second “g” from their name… not the first.

What do you think?

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 11:06 AM UTC

15 Comments »

As many of you will have noticed, the Computer Aid blog (and even the main website) stopped working for a few hours today.

The joys of changing hosting companies.

I was originally with http://www.home-business-host.com/ for over 3 years.

They were great while Computer Aid was small: very helpful, and very reliable.

But over the last few months, it seemed that Computer Aid had outgrown the capacity of the shared hosting.

After a quick look around, I decided that a clustered hosting seemed like an ideal solution, but it was a more expensive solution.

It looks like when it comes to clustered hosting (like with many things in life), it becomes a case of: fast, cheap, reliable … pick any 2.

So I reluctantly went with: netfirms

They were cheap, but I read about many peoples bad experiences with Netfirms (mostly from 2006… so I hoped things had improved since then).

Well, I can’t comment on the speed yet, but as expected, customer support isn’t fast (so I had to really struggle to transfer my blog across.

My forum is still not working (and if me and netfirms cant fix it, then I might just dump it).

It seems that most problems arose from trying to transfer my site in a standard way: copy the files and copy the databases.

This worked to some extent, but it seemed that the .htaccess files I copied caused problems. But removing them didn’t help much either. Many people have complained about netfirms non-standard implementation of apache/.htaccess, I guess I’m another victim.

In the end, I created a blank blog using the netfirms control panel, then imported my original database, THEN copy my gila theme!

Anyway, I apologise for the outage.

I still have many plugins to enable, a forum to resurrect, and a re-installation of aw-stats… Looks like I’ll be busy for a while yet…

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Technical at 6:34 PM UTC

2 Comments »

I just thought I’d let everyone know that some parts of this blog will become “paid content” sections.

To keep things fair (those who know me, will know that I’m a big fan of being fair, honest and open), it will only be selected posts… probably less than 10% of the overall blog.

The way I’d like it to work (this part is not finalised yet), is that paid posts will be split into 2 parts:

• The first part will be free and contain background information
• The second part will need to be paid for by paypal (I’m thinking around $4 – $8 per post), and it will contain the real interesting/vital information.

To be even more fair to my loyal readers, all new posts will be free, and a post might become a pay post only once it drops off the front page, and it shows a certain amount of long-term popularity.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and by looking at the stats on my website, I’ve noticed that certain posts are a lot more popular than others (even some posts from 2006 show up in my top 10 posts).

So I figured that if someone is looking for a solution to a specific problem, then paying $5 for the solution is a lot better than spending 10 or 20 times as much to have a professional tech fix the problem.

The stats also show that I get between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors per month, but only 1% will click on the google ads… each ad earns me an average of $0.23, with about an average of about 6 ad clicks per day, I’m getting about $40 per month.

I can easily see that most visitors to my site are looking for a specific solution… They read a relevant post, fix their problem, and then leave (rarely leaving any feedback, and rarely looking at other parts of the website).

I started thinking: If I could just earn $1 from each visitor, then my website would earn much more than Computer Aid!

So, I thought about how to increase my income from the Computer Aid website. Most solutions seemed to revolve around changing my website into a hard-sell site, with up-sells and continuity programs and all sorts of marketing stuff that I really didn’t like much…

So, I came up with a more subtle approach.

I’m not sure how well it will work, but its worth a try.

What are your thoughts? Do you think its a good/bad idea?

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 11:09 AM UTC

9 Comments »