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A kiosk has been developed to be installed on-site so customers can enter payments, move into units, or printout a statement of their account. As an added bonus, anything that can be done on the kiosk can be done from any computer with an Internet connection! The kiosk will be available in September, 2003. Contact us for more information. You can also see the kiosk at the Self Storage Association trade show in San Diego Sep 11-12 and at the Inside Self Storage Expo Oct 2-3 in New Orleans. Click here to learn more.

Getting your RentPlus system to run as fast as possible is an essential part of providing great customer service. Customers should not have to wait for long periods of time while you post a payment, print a receipt, or wait for a report to finish. While not all delays can be avoided, you can do quite a bit to make things run as fast as possible. Here are some hints and tricks to do so:

Windows: As files are stored on your computer, they can end up actually being spread out over the entire hard disk. This is called file fragmentation, and can greatly affect the speed of your system. Windows includes a utility program to de-fragment your hard disk. This utility should be scheduled to run automatically at regular intervals (once a week is typical). The utility is usually in System Tools in the Accessories menu.

Memory Management: You should make sure that your computer has reserved enough space on the hard disk for “virtual” memory. This is disk space that is used in conjunction with the physical memory to enhance performance. To adjust these settings in Windows XP, go to Control Panel | System | Advanced | Performance | Advanced | Virtual Memory. If you are using an earlier Windows version, go to Control Panel | System and look for the virtual memory setting. We recommend that you set the initial size to 1024 and the maximum size to 2048.

Computer: If you do not turn the computer off each night, then we recommend that you restart the computer once a day.

Extras:

The computer equipment that you have will make a tremendous difference in the performance of your system. The areas that are most important to examine are: the processor, system memory, the hard disk, the video memory, the version of Windows, and the printer.

Processor: The faster the better. A 3.0 GHz (gigahertz) processor is almost four times faster than an 800 MHz (megahertz) processor.

System Memory: You should have at least 256 megabytes (mb) of memory in your system, and we actually recommend 512. Memory is very inexpensive: 256mb now costs about $20. The kind and speed of memory is also important. Use the fastest memory that your system will support.

Hard Disk Drive: The speed (not the size) of the hard drive can have a big impact on performance. Newer drives have a speed of 7200 rpm, while older drives were mostly 5400 rpm. This is an increase of 33% - upgrading from a 5400 to a 7200 rpm drive will usually have a very significant effect.

Video Memory: Upgrading to a video card that has 32mb or 64mb will improve your overall speed significantly, especially if you have a video port that is part of the computer motherboard that only has 4 or 8mb. If you have a lot of flickering and repainting of the screen going on, this may improve things quite a bit.

Windows Version: We recommend using Windows XP Professional Edition. It is significantly faster than previous versions of Windows, mostly because it does a much better job of managing system memory. It is also more stable than earlier versions of Windows and less likely to crash.

Printer: Your printer can affect performance as well. The main factors are the speed of the printer (pages per minute - ppm), and the memory in the printer. A printer that prints 12 ppm will print 200 letters in about 17 minutes. A printer that only does 4 ppm will take 50 minutes. A printer without much memory will force Windows into using more of its memory to manage the print jobs. Most printers today go into idle mode automatically after a few minutes if they are not used. How long the printer takes to ‘wake up’ will also affect performance.

If you have multiple workstations sharing a RentPlus data file, you can improve the performance of your network system by examining these factors:

Network Architecture: Use a hub or router that each computer connects to, instead of connecting computers one to another.

Network Speed: your network should be at least 100mb – performance in a 10mb network will be very slow. If you have a large facility, consider upgrading to a 1000mb network for best performance.

Network Server: The computer where the data is located should not be used as a workstation. Unless you are using a specific server operating system such as Windows Server 2000, then we recommend using Windows XP on this computer, and use the Control Panel | System settings to set “Processor Scheduling” to Background services and Memory usage to ‘system cache’. This will make this computer focus its resources on serving up the data to the other workstations in the network.

How fast is fast enough? Tough question! Speed is a very subjective thing. However, here are some guidelines to consider:

1) Select a customer, post a payment, and print the receipt. Ideally, this should take 10-15 seconds. It should only take more than 30-40 seconds if you have an especially complex payment or customer to process.

2) Daily processing at the beginning of the day. This can vary greatly. In a first of month system, it will be just a few seconds most days, but may take up to an hour on some days of the month. In an anniversary system, it should not take more than about 10 minutes a day.

3) Printing the Business Summary for the previous month. Two to five minutes is the target for this report, and it should not take more than 10 minutes.

These are just guidelines, not hard and fast rules, and performance can vary greatly even between similar systems. It is the combination of all of the items mentioned in this article (and dozens more) that ultimately determine the performance of your system. o

For further information please contact Rob Broadbent, Managing Director for HI-TECH Australasia. Call toll free 1 300 130 408 or email aus@hitechsoftware.com.

If you have two units that you are combining (e.g., two 5x5’s become a 5x10), the best way to accomplish it in RentPlus is to remove the two 5x5 units, and add a new 5x10 unit. Use Tools | Setup | Units to remove the vacant 5x5 units and to create the new 5x10. This will preserve your unit counts in the occupancy history. Use the same technique if you resize a unit (e.g., make a 5x10 into a 10x10: remove the old unit and create the new one. This will preserve your square and cubic footage statistics for past periods. ‘Removing’ a unit does not delete it—it is preserved for informational purposes.