As part of a creating a Technology Plan, you need to know what, (if anything) you are working with. If you are a new, or tiny organization, you may have a PC or two, some software, and not much else. If you have 3-5 PC’s you may have purchased these at various times. Above 5 or so it may be difficult to keep all this in your head.

While this can get complicated, you really don’t need to keep a wealth of detail on each machine. Consider keeping the following information regarding each machine:

Make: example: IBM

Acquisition: December 1999

Memory: 512Kb

Operating System: Windows XP Release 2

Hard Disk: 40 gigabytes

Location: Receptionist’s Desk

Primary user: or “owner” Sheila

Alternate Users: Tom, Dick, Harry

Word Processing: WordPerfect 12

Spreadsheet: Excel

Database: FileMaker Pro

Monitor Type: LCD 17″

etc. etc.

Place this information in a spreadsheet, one item per row. This allows easy comparison between similar items. Be sure to include printers.

You can use the mem program to find out how much memory your computer has.

Click on Start | Run and type in cmd to get to a command line, and then type mem. You should see a window that shows the current memory.