We've neglected posting to our blog regularly in the last 6 months or so and we're determined to correct that in 2012. Although we haven't been making many posts recently, there has been no shortage of activity that we want to let the community know about. Here is a short summary of what we've been working on lately:
1. We'll be updating the rates page on our website with our 2012 rates soon. The new rates will go into effect beginning on 2012 Q2 and we'll create another post here on the blog as well when the updated rates have been posted. One upcoming change is that we're adding additional scheduling options to work with a UTC technician outside of our standard business hours due to popular demand.
2. We'll be updating our workstation recommendations with new desktop and new laptop models soon. Technology moves fast, and we do our best to keep pace. The new desktop continues the miniaturization trend we began with our previous model while increasing performance, and the new laptop model is faster and more power efficient than our previous model.
3. We've been actively researching and building new cost-saving enterprise solutions in our office lab in the areas of high availability routers, storage servers and application servers. We're working hard to create new solutions that are highly reliable and affordable at the same time using free software, and we'll be posting new products to our website soon that are the result of this research and development.
4. We've been running a pilot program to accept computer donations, refurbish the computers and donate them back to members of the community in need free of charge. We'll be posting the details of the program here soon including information about how you can participate as a business, organization or individual. UTC technicians believe that the best way to recycle is to re-use first whenever possible. We're excited about the potential of this new program to keep working hardware out of the landfill and to get computers into the hands of people in the community that need them!
5. We've become an official repair center for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. This project has noble goals to spread economic opportunity to children in the developing world by providing technology to them free of charge. In addition, the project is at the forefront of sustainable hardware design - all for a cost of roughly $200 per computer. We'll be donating labor time to keep OLPC computers running in support of the project. We'll post more details on this soon, for now you can visit our repair center page on the OLPC website at:
Well, that's everything we can think of at the moment - we also don't want to forget to say 'Happy 2012' to everyone too!
