Sunday Stock: Greeting Card Templates

Did you go to the store and spend a small fortune on greeting cards for the holidays? Well hopefully today's blog can help you to save money on your cards in the future. Xerox has a number of free card templates you can download and use. There are easily over one hundred of them to choose from. Each of the templates is provided as a PDF file. So you'll need to import the PDF into CorelDRAW for further editing and customizing.

Want to save even more money? Get a Free Color Printer from Xerox! You'll have to fill out an online request form. Basically Xerox wants to make sure that you'll be printing a decent volume of documents each month. If you quality, they'll send you a free network color printer. I have one of the printers myself and love it!

Share

Hump Day Hardware: Memory Cards

Last week I talked about the usefulness of a USB flash drive. This week we're going to talk about the flash memory cards used inside of digital cameras, mobile phones and other devices.

One unfortunate part of this product category is that there are multiple standards in the market. I won't even try to talk about all of them. Instead I'll focus on the three that seem to be the most widely used: CompactFlash, SD and microSD. Another flavor is Sony's Memory Stick and I just have never used it so I don't have any information to offer.

CompactFlash is often used in higher-end digital cameras. It is the biggest physical card and often the most expensive. If you are a photographer, you'll probably want to have a large capacity card and probably several of them. A good choice is the SanDisk 16 GB Extreme III card which sells for around $85. For those who want one of the fastest cards available, the SanDisk 16 GB Extreme IV delivers, but also comes with a higher price. Sure, there are smaller cards available at lower prices, but I would personally stick with at least 16 GB so you have a card that won't fill up too fast.

SD cards are also popular choices in cameras and phones. There is also a flavor called SDHC (high capacity) for those who want more storage space. The Kingston 16 GB SDHC card offers a lot of storage space for only $33 and change.

The last flavor is microSD which has an even smaller footprint than SD cards. I've not seen it used in a camera, but I'm sure it is. You'll also find it quite popular in newer phones as a way to expand memory. My choice would be the SanDisk 16 GB microSDHC card which sells for under $65. Depending on your needs, it might be a good idea to have multiple cards to swap in and out of your device.

I think almost everyone these days is going to have a device using some sort of memory card. Make sure you get cards with plenty of capacity and speed!

Share

Hump Day Hardware: nVidia Graphics Cards

We are graphics professionals and we use graphics software on a non-stop basis. Thus it is important for us to get a display that gives us a high-quality image. Yes, a good monitor is very important. Regardless of your monitor, it is very important to have a good graphics card to drive the monitor.

These days there are really three major choices for video cards. First is video on the motherboard. This is not a good choice. It might be the least expensive in the short term, but it will cost you more time and trouble in the long run. Second is an ATI card. ATI has been around for a long time and they make good cards, but these days they are definitely not the best. Even so, the driver running the card is every bit as important as the hardware and I just don't trust ATI's drivers. That leaves nVidia cards as the very obvious best choice.

Recently nVidia released a new series of cards that easily runs the various benchmarks much faster than any previous card from any manufacturer. In fact, they won the tests with pre-release drivers that are certain to get better with time. Unless you are playing the latest and greatest games, you probably don't need this kind of speed. But that doesn't mean a fast card isn't of benefit.

As designers we tend to want to run our monitors at higher resolutions. This requires more horsepower to push the larger number of pixels around. If you are working with dual monitors, you'll need even more horsepower because there are twice as many pixels.

If you want the latest and greatest then you want the nVidia GTX 280. No, it isn't cheap, but it is loaded with speed. You can take one step back on the speed and save yourself around $100 by going with the nVidia GTX 260. Believe me, you'll still have a graphics card faster than 99.9% of the planet, at least in the short term. To save even more money, you can buy a card that is a bit over a year old, the nVidia 8800GTS. This is the card I have in my machine and I paid nearly three times as much as it costs today after rebate. It is a great card, it just isn't the latest and greatest. But if you want bang for the buck, it definitely delivers!

Share