So you need a new computer? If it is going to be owned by IAM you need IAMtech’s help to purchase it for you – you should not do it on your own unless we authorise you to do so. If it is going to be owned by you personally then we can help you too, or you can do it yourself but be careful! Please refer to these articles if you do it yourself:
You might think that if you get us to buy a new computer for you you can have it tomorrow. Sorry but you would be wrong. Before we hand your computer over to you we need to do a lot of work on it in order to prepare it for use and to protect the investment for the future. We also need some information from you.
Before buying it we need to know:
- What will the computer be used for?
- Is there a computer that you want it to be as fast as or faster than? We would then look at that computer and use it as a starting point for our shopping – this is a big help. See this explanation for why.
- do you need to use it with a projector? If so, what connections does your projector have? Older projectors only have VGA whereas newer ones have HDMI or both. If your computer doesn’t have the right connection you’ll either need to buy a new projector or an expensive converter ($80) that we cannot buy in country and would need to mail order from overseas (note that local shopkeepers may try to sell you an adaptor – these do not work and are not designed for that purpose). Also note that some computers come with a “displayport” socket instead of HDMI or VGA – there are apparently adapters available for these but we will need to test it in the shop to be certain it works.
- does it need long battery life? We’ll do our best to find one with good battery life, although these days all newer computers are much improved over older computers battery life. Sometimes we can choose an SSD harddrive rather than a traditional one with moving parts – these use less battery but are smaller in storage space.
- does it need to be lightweight and small? Some computers are now coming without internal CD/DVD drives. This does mean that if you need one of those you would need an external one, but overall they will probably still take up less space.
- Do you need a touch screen? Not really. It is nice, but you can use a computer well without one. These are becoming available in country now.
- What version of office do you require? If you only need Word/Excel/Powerpoint then we will buy Office Home and Business edition. If you need Access or Publisher we will need to buy the Professional edition. We will not buy Home and Student edition for any IAM owned laptops as that would be in breach of the licence.
To set it up we need:
- to know the IAM email account of the person who will use it. These days all Windows computers use email accounts as their username so we have to have this before we can start setting the computer up.
- the external backup drive that your team uses for backups as we will do an initial backup there and setup ongoing backups for you
What will we do before we hand over the computer to you:
- We will burn a full set of recovery disks for your computer.
- We will ensure that Windows is fully updated with all the necessary patches and updates (if it is Windows 8 this will include updating it to Windows 8.1). This can take time if there are a lot of updates – particularly if it needs Windows 8.1 because it is an extremely large download. Unfortunately computers are not sold completely up to date in any country, but more so here in Afghanistan.
- We will uninstall all trialware that comes with it – often there are trial versions of antivirus, Microsoft Office and other applications. If we don’t do this now it will just create more work and inconvenience for you later.
- We will set the recycle bin to ask you to confirm before deleting any file (believe it or not Microsoft have decided that deleting a file without confirmation is acceptable).
- We will install software to do an image backup of your computer
- We will install software for doing regular backups of your computer and will set this up to work
- We will install Google Chrome internet browser for you. This is preferred to Internet Explorer as it is faster and is rarer to have security flaws.
- We will install a program that you can use to keep your computer running healthily so you don’t have to bring it back to us when it seems to be slowing down.
- We will install the software required for IAM’s file sharing solution and will ensure that the computer has access to the folders used by all staff (999 and 998).
- We will install an email program. Windows Live Mail is preferred to Thunderbird as it can work better on poor quality networks, and preferred to outlook because outlook is difficult to backup effectively.
- We will install an antivirus program and ensure it receives all the latest virus updates.
- We will do an image backup of your computer
Once all this is complete you can have the computer. Thanks for being patient with us so that we can do a thorough job for you.