It’s very annoying and inconvenient when your laptop decides to give up the ghost and that is what has happened with my teenage son’s laptop. Very annoying indeed as it is only 18 months old and just out of warranty, which always seems to be the way.

The battery refuses to charge and there’s another problem so I have to decide whether to have it repaired or replace it. He told me there’s the cheaper option of buying reconditioned machines so we have been considering refurbished netbooks as a change from what he currently has. There are few sights sadder than a teenager without access to Facebook so I have to make a decision pretty soon.

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I bought my man a lovely new printer for Xmas in 2009 and boy did I go to a lot of trouble to get it too. Basically his old printer, while still in good order, was too slow and did not do a lot of extra stuff such as develop photographs and was not wifi enabled. So I spent the better part of a month looking at printers and accessories – cartridges, the laserjet 3600 toner, paper, scanning capabilities…

I found what I assumed would be the perfect machine and bought it from Amazon and had it delivered while at the same time trying to hide this huge box where he could not find it. Either way it was all for nothing to date he has not used the darn thing – first thing he said when he opened it was ‘does it have a slide scanner…?’…no, it did not, the very thing he wanted in a printer and the one I went to so much trouble to purchase did not have it. So, it sits unused – that’s the last time I buy anything to do with technology for a man ever again!

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Very often you can get a message across more effectively by using a picture, photo or a logo than by simply using words. This is certainly the case in marketing and advertising where images carry more weight – consumers are very image-aware these days and remember a product for the way it appears. Just take the Coca-Cola logo as an excellent example; there is not a country anywhere in the world where you will not see this famous trademark and even if you cannot understand the local lingo you will certainly know what that little bottle means. That logo is one of the best and most successful marketing stamps in advertising history.

Even small businesses need a special ‘stamp’ on their product or service which makes them stand out from the rest of the crowd and this is where, if you own a small business, you should set aside a chunk of your marketing budget to explore some Logo Design Tips from experts in the field. What you need is a logo that is particular and exclusive to your business, one that catches the consumers eye and one that other’s will be inspired by but not able to reproduce themselves. Many companies have a team which specifically looks after the visuals in their marketing strategy, but when deciding on a logo – either new to replace and existing one – outside sourcing for this purpose can offer you a whole different perspective on what you wish to achieve.

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