This year at IT Partners we gave the team hampers. Where possible, we included NZ made food products, but I also wanted to include a tech related gift. In previous years we have had items like iPods which went down really well! Two items came to mind, one was a Roomba (a robot vacuum cleaner) and the other was a PowerStick (a portable batter for emergency charging). The PowerStick won - great design, comes with all the adapters requested for iPod, Nokia, BlackBerry and a whole lot of other phone and device types. Contact us if you want the NZ distributor's details.
Thank you to one and all for your support of the IT Partners team in 2009. It has been another year of growth, with welcome additions to the team of Frazer Thompson and Christo Allers, along with some fantastic new clients. On Friday the 11th we had our bi-monthly board meeting followed by our Christmas Party. It was held at Smith & McKenzie chophouse – a great evening with all the team and partners. Photos can be found here - what a great tool Flickr is.
On a personal note, Sarah & I were delighted to announce that on Saturday the 5th at NZST 4:25pm Alexander Dean Morton-Johnson was born – all is going well and the household is returning to normality.
From all the team at IT Partners, have a great Christmas break and we look forward to seeing you all in 2010.
We now have 100% deployment of Windows 7 within the office. The last to move was Greig, for good reason in that his laptop was due for replacement this month (we have a two year replacement policy for engineers with their laptops). Greig is a hard man to impress. His comments have been surprisingly favourable. In terms of hardware, Greig received a custom built HP 8530p with a 120GB Solid State drive and Intel Core 2 Duo 9600 Processor.
In my use of Windows 7, I have really appreciated the speed of start-up, faster application start times, layout of menus, and ease of use of the control panel.
One really useful tool is the Snipping Tool which allows you to take limited screenshots. Such a simple tool that makes you wonder why it took so long to become part of the Windows operating system.
Regarding Solid State drives, initially we were really disappointed with how they performed under Windows XP. With Windows 7, we have only been impressed. We were so impressed, in fact, that they are now part of our standard build when replacing laptops. The slight price premium is well compensated by an improvement in system performance and increase in time available when operating on battery.