Law Office Computing
Winton Woods
November 2002
Ten years ago when I started writing this column, information technology was in a state of constant, exciting change. New software programs and new hardware seemed to appear every week and many of those new things were tools that I felt would be useful to lawyers. They provided much of the grist for this column in the early years and they spawned the vision of information technology that led to the “dotcom era” where every new idea seemed to be a winner. I have a very strong recollection of a conversation with the CEO of an Internet company that I was thinking of investing in because I thought their product was useful. I asked him for some numbers about his company and he replied, with a tone of disgust, “In the Internet space we don’t need numbers.” His company is history. Meanwhile many small companies have paid attention to the numbers and have prospered by producing small products that really work. In the last couple of years, as I have said several times recently, we have entered into a steady state regarding the quality of available hardware and the usability of modern software. As a result, much of the new stuff that I see is really just an incremental improvement on some existing software or hardware and not really worth writing a whole column about. Over the past year I have collected a number of those small tools and because they are so useful I’m going to devote this column to giving the dribbles and drabs of information in regard to them. These are tools that I use regularly and I can recommend highly. They are also inexpensive!
FinePrint 2000 is a printing utility that installs on your computer and appears as a virtual printer in your list of printers. It allows you to condense documents by printing 2, 4 or 8 pages on a single sheet of paper, just like the condensed deposition product that you get from a court reporter. FinePrint 2000 allows you to preview exactly what will be printed out before you go to paper. After you have seen and approved of the format of the condensed print job you then select one of your physical printers to print the actual material. FinePrint 2000 also allows you to print double-sided booklets from a standard word processing document or a collection of web pages. FinePrint 2000 also has a nifty little utility that allows you to print stationery and create forms of documents that you need on a recurring basis. You can download a thirty-day free trial of FinePrint 2000 from their web site www.fineprint.com or buy the program for $39. They have a couple of other tools, including a pdf file writer that are worth looking at.
Stamps.com is one of those few survivors of the collapse of the dotcom bubble. It is a virtual postage meter that allows you to buy postage online and it print it on your local printer. The program is incredibly easy to use. You simply select the weight and the kind of postage that you want to print and then print an envelope along with the mailing address. You can also print labels that act like peel off stamps. I send a lot of stuff by USPS Priority Mail and I have found Stamps.com to be much easier than trying to figure the correct amount of postage each on a package with a postage chart. I simply put the package on the scale, plug the information into the software program and click a button and my correctly addressed envelope is printed out with the proper postage. I can even select delivery confirmation and other special services from the Postal Service directly from the Stamps.com Web site. Stamps.com will give you a 29-day free trial and they also provide a free scale for so-called power users. I haven’t stood in line at the post office for a long, long time. Stamps.com does charge a 10 percent service fee but I feel that I make it up with timesaving and accurate postage calculations. Stamps.com can be found just where you would expect at www.Stamps.com. They offer a lot of other office services at excellent prices and are great people to deal with.
A few months back I recommended that you initiate and implement a planned regular “defragmentation” of your hard drives. Heavily fragmented drives are slower and more susceptible to crashing but defragging is often put off because it is time consuming and boring. Since my column on the topic I have looked at a number of products. I have finally settled on a product from Executive Software called Diskeeper. The wonderful thing about Diskeeper is that it keeps your hard drives in an advanced state of “defragmentation” without having to run time-consuming manual programs that are built into Windows and some of the other utilities that are available for that purpose. The full product Diskeeper has a feature called “Set It and Forget It” which will automatically access and defragment your hard drive on a continuing basis. Executive Software will allow you to try out their manual program for free but I suggest that you just spend the $29 necessary to get the full product because the “Set It and Forget It” feature is so very useful. Since I have installed the Diskeeper 7.0 software, I simply don’t have to worry about fragmentation at all. I have checked my hard drives periodically just to make sure the Diskeeper does what it says it does and I have found that it performs its work silently and with perfection. Executive Software also has some other interesting little utilities that you can review at their web site www.executive.com.
Memory Cardreaders
If you have a digital camera, a MP3 player or any one of a number of other small electronic devices you probably have become familiar with a flash memory card of some type. The three most common forms are called Memory Stick, SmartCard, and CompactFlash. These are very small and light memory devices that can hold up to 560 MB of data on a device about the size of a large postage stamp. Most people never remove the card from the device. For example you probably hook up your digital camera up to your computer with the cable and download the images to your hard drive. But there is another and much better way. For $15 or so you can purchase a small device called a cardreader that is about the size of a book of matches. You put the card in the cardreader and plug it into a USB port on your computer. You are then able to read and utilize the content on the memory card just as if it was on a hard drive. Now when I want to print pictures from my digital camera I stick the memory card into a device that is about one inch square. Then my Windows XP computer automatically invokes the picture viewing software and I can do what ever I want to do with those images. I can watch a slide show or I can save the images to a folder someplace else on my drive. The fact is, however, that this little device is really just another hard drive that I can save files to. Instead of carrying of ZipDisk or CD around I can put up to 500 megabytes of data on this card and stick it in my wallet. A 128 MB card costs around $60. The cards and the readers can be purchased at Frys or CompUSA. I have found a place on the Internet that sells these this kind of products at a very inexpensive price. Go to www.sterlingtek.com to review what is available in the flash memory area. Sterlingtek also sells other digital camera accessories, rechargeable batteries and chargers and related items. Their service is excellent and their shipping charges are very low.
I would love to hear from you about little, inexpensive tools that you have found useful. Just drop me a note at courtroom@mail.com and I will check them out! Thanks!
PS- I have discovered to my glee that Stephen, the supercilious teenager from hell, has been replaced on the Dell television spots by a very professional young woman. She is great and he is gone. Praise the Lord!!