Life Is Great With Modern Day Cheap Laptops

The modern day computer market is a completely different place to shop than what it was some decades ago. In the current market, the bulky and traditional computers find no place and are effectively replaced by smart, sleek and performance-oriented laptops.

A laptop is an integral part for many of us for some reason or the other. While the office executives make use of it for performing their duties even while on the move, the housewives and students make use of it to search the Internet or valuable information for miscellaneous purposes.

Let us study some of the numerous benefits of a laptop over the traditional desktop computers. A laptop offers higher levels of portability, flexibility, reliability and is space-conscious. The emergence of new market players, intense competition, falling price, higher levels of customer satisfaction and favourable market trends have all contributed to the growth of the laptop market in the recent years.

The modern day cheap laptops offer exceptional solutions when it comes to complex needs, high-quality image resolution, viewing angle and contrast ratio. Most of the latest laptops score heavily when it comes to satisfying the ever-growing needs of their users.

If you are planning to buy a fresh or second-hand laptop, you must consider some critical factors such as performance, price, substitute products, prevailing market trends, customer service and brand awareness. You must demand the original bill and warranty documents from the vendor and stay away from the grey market. It is of no use to buy the cheap laptops and regret at a later stage. Do not get lured by false promises and tall claims of profit-motivated vendors who leave no stone unturned to get easy and innocent customers.

Some of the leading names in the world of cheap laptops are Acer, HCL and Compaq. The advanced and stylish Acer laptops such as the Acer Aspire 5583WXMi, Acer TravelMate 4233WLMi, Acer TM 6292 and Acer Ferrari 1005WTMi offer complete value for your money. These highly elegant and power-packed Acer laptops will never let you down with sub-standard performance and will reduce your burden with some exceptional quality and performance on a consistent basis.

Thus, it can be easily concluded that the present day cheap laptops are great assets for each one of us. The only thing we need to remember is that it' s better to wait for a purchase than to buy a low quality laptop.


Source : http://www.articlealley.com/article_555590_10.html

How to Design A Powerful Inventory Software?

I have been design and developing inventory tracking software for the pass 7 years, and from my experience, the most difficult part of Inventory software is the month end calculation. Any programmer can do that, but if the data grow from 4 GB per month, improper design will just kill the database in less than a year!

Let me share some ideas I use to counter such a problem:

Idea #1 - Design the system to batch processing.
You must admit you can't have all eggs in a basket! While the market is screaming for Realtime software, it is just not practical to invoke the business rules every-time someone entered a transaction. Any inventory system design in this way will require 10 times processing power, so unless it is a must have feature, I won't recommend to design the system to cater for Realtime processing at all.

Idea #2 - Consolidate the processing into daily, weekly and monthly.
You need only to store the monthly summary for a large inventory system, but you must process and store weekly and even daily data temporarily. Every day summary will be consolidated into the weekly summary, then clear daily data for next week daily process. Perform the same with the weekly data after consolidated into the monthly table. If you are using Microsoft SQL server, extra care must be taken when clearing the temporary data. There are some special way other than SQL "delete from" command to speed up the process!

Idea #3 - Report processing.
Do not store all report summaries into tables, use the tables as summary cache. Trust me on this, there will be many report to come, and every time you need a report, a summary table will be created, then the database will grow into a monster very fast! Instead, combine daily, weekly and monthly data in the process and use SQL statement to join the different table into logical dataset, and you report from there! Unless there are many people requesting the same report all the time, you might want to consider create data warehouse for the reporting purposes.

Idea #4 - Use multi-tier technology.
Multi-tier technology allows you to separate the system business rules from processing, may be even taking some of the processing, such as reporting processing from the database server into the application server, load balance the machine processing power and provide better user experience.

There are still many things to consider, but these 4 major ideas should outline the critical requirement of the heavy duty Inventory software. Just keep in mind the design process must always align with the business environment of your client, the volume of data and the business nature will decide how the system should handle the processing, so keep study, study and study until you understand what is your client requirements...


Source : http://www.articlealley.com/article_555674_10.html

What Makes VS2008 500% Faster in Coding?

Do you know you can do programming 5X faster than before? In Visual Studio 2008 there are some tools many developers ignore since Visual Studio 2005, but I must stress these tools has been improved dramatically to better support database programming, and I won't be surprise to write database application few times faster than conventional programmer!

OK, you might hear something called RAD long time ago, but I don't think many of you take it seriously. I use RAD since Borland Delphi, and I am impressed that VS2008 bring this even further! If you have no idea what is RAD, you must continue to read on, I guarantee this will open your eye to the new programming era.

So what is RAD? RAD stands for Rapid Application Development, is a set of tools or code generator to map database layer into logical object, without a single code! You can even override the event and create your own insert, update and delete business rules.

The dataset designer has been introduced since VS2003, but at that time the technology still not mature. Since VS2005, dataset designer has been evolved into powerful object mapping tools. You can define all business rules in the dataset designer, logically separate all interfaces with data. There are still some limitation, in theory the dataset should be portable to ASP.Net, if this can be achieved, imagine how easy to port existing windows base clients into Web base clients!

VS2008 introduce a new component for ADO.NET, called TableAdapterManager. This powerful component allows developer to easily perform Master and Details Hierarchical updates in few clicks! These are not possible few years back without lots of codings.

The framework does not stop here, new VS2008 extend n-tier support further by separating data access object from dataset designer, now the client can easily share data access interface with the server, developer no longer needs to separate the interface manually!

The enhancement still continues, many exciting features will be included into VS2008, currently available as beta, such as Silverlight and Microsoft Sync framework for ADO.Net, and many more...


Source : http://www.articlealley.com/article_555749_10.html