Nah, forget that. The cyclic slump means you now have time to be creative and explore new avenues for revenue. When business is slow you have to go out and create opportunities. What opportunities? Why, we're glad you asked.

Everybody has problems, yes? As we've all joked beyond the point of humor, you can't run on a Windows platform and not have problems. When customers have a problem, you have an opportunity. The trick is to divine the nature of the problem.

We at RAM put our heads together and came up with a top 10 list of the most common problems likely to apply in the whitebox space. Many of your customers will be struggling with these issues, but they're so common that few people think to address them, sort of like CO2 emissions or painfully stupid summer blockbusters. You may not strike gold with all of these suggestions, but we're willing to bet that at least a couple can generate new sales within your customer base.

Ready to dust off your sales hat and polish your pitches? Let's start cleaning.

This is a no-brainer for office environments, including SOHO users. We're all familiar with PC noise. It's an everyday phenomenon, like road noise in a car. I remember laughing about being able to cook an egg on the top of a 486 chip. Today, the power consumption and heat dissipation in Pentium 4 and Athlon 64/FX chips could probably cook up the entire chicken, and removing that heat from the CPU's surface can require some serious airflow. Practically any graphics card above $50 has a GPU heatsink fan on it. Add on memory, drives, motherboard power circuitry, and other components, and it's no wonder that chasses now come with one to four case fans in addition to the power supply fan.

Each of those fans makes noise. Figure 20 dB here, 25 dB there. Sure, each one might be "whisper quiet," but how many people have to be whispering next to you before the noise becomes noticeable? Then annoying? Then unbearable?

"Even at low levels, unwanted sounds can constitute health and safety hazards by increasing stress levels, and impairing communication and concentration," notes the Canada Safety Council on its Web site. More specifically, two reports have fanned the flames against hot PCs. The first study, titled "The disruption of office-related tasks by speech and office noise," published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, demonstrated that even without background speech office noise obstructed performance on mental arithmetic tasks. A newer report by Gary Evans and Dana Johnson of Cornell University titled "Stress and Open-Office Noise" was published in the October 2000 Journal of Applied Psychology. Cornell's subsequent press release noted:

"Low-level noise in open-style offices seems to result in higher levels of stress and lower task motivation, according to a new study by a Cornell University environmental psychologist. And, surprisingly, experienced workers in these mildly noisy offices make fewer ergonomic adjustments to their workstations than do workers in quiet offices.

"These findings suggest that even moderately noisy open offices might contribute significantly to health problems such as heart disease (due to elevated levels of epinephrine, a stress hormone) and musculoskeletal problems, says Gary Evans, professor of design and environmental analysis. . . . The environmental psychologists found that the workers in the noisy office experienced significantly higher levels of stress (as measured by urinary epinephrine), made 40 percent fewer attempts to solve an unsolvable puzzle and made only half as many ergonomic adjustments to their workstations as did their colleagues in quiet offices."

There are several ways in which you can work to reduce system noise, either as an upsell in new systems or an upgrade to existing ones. For starters, consider your components.

Does the customer need an add-on graphics card, or will an IGP-based motherboard serve as well for his applications? Not all hard drives are created equal. Seagate in particular has paid a lot of attention in recent years to keeping high RPM drive noise to an absolute minimum.

Use a slower optical drive. Sure, a 52X CD-ROM may be only $5 more, but optical drive noise increases markedly past about 40X. Also, the better quality burners now feature technologies such as disc balancing and dynamic vibration dampening, both of which can reduce noise output. Samsung has been a leader on this front, but several others have followed.

Consider the motherboard. I recently received an email from FSC America (www.fsc-america.com) informing me that the Fujitsu-Siemens D1858 (925X chipset) I'd sent to HTPC OEM Niveus Media as a favor had tested out 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than any other motherboard, including Intel or ASUS. The F-S boards are more expensive, but the lower temperatures can translate into lower fan noise.

Use better power supplies. I've had exceptionally quiet results from Antec, Fortron Source, and Zalman. That said, beware of these new fanless power supplies. The most famous example of this is SilverStone's SST-ST30NF. In my tests, the exterior of the PSU hit 75 degrees Celsius after 90 minutes of burn-in. Whatever noise savings you gain here will be erased by the extra case fans requires to exhaust all that fiery heat. Similarly, be wary of products such as noise dampening foam pads for lining the chassis interior. These may cut down on vibration noise, but they also act as heat insulators.

Switch from 80 mm case fans to 120 mm, changing out cases if necessary to accommodate the larger size. The larger the fan radius, the slower the blades can spin to move the same amount of air, yielding lower noise. Also, 120 mm fan-friendly cases will tend to be better ventilated with top panel grills and lots of air holes in the floor.

Consider water cooling. No, you're not likely to run a line of water coolers down a string of office cubicle PCs, but home office users might consider it. Replacing the CPU and GPU fans with a silent device such as Zalman's Reserator might appeal to those who crave quiet.

Buy Zalman. I don't normally endorse one company above all competitors, but, honestly, no one specializes in noise reduction as much or as well as Zalman (www.zalmanusa.com). From northbridge coolers to the noiseless TNN 500AF case, Zalman's performance is matched only by its quality and even occasional beauty.

Beyond components, keep an eye out for BTX. The new form factor overhauls the placement of and airflow around hot PC components. The overall effect is supposed to yield far less fan usage for superior cooling.

There's no money in selling wireless, right? Fry's and Buy.com will clobber you on router and NIC pricing all day and night. For that matter, wireless NICs now come built into most notebooks and many high-end motherboards. Routers are one of those things you give away to keep the customer happy as you turn a blind eye to margin.

But there is so much more to wireless than routers and NICs, only most buyers remain ignorant of the possibilities. First up is the dead spot problem. Most every house and office that attempts a WLAN through multiple obstructions faces this. There are some areas where the signals bounce just right (or wrong) and connection strength plunges. Additionally, obstructions can degrade signals such that a connection might not be dead but the user will be forced to work at a much slower throughput rate. Particularly for businesses, a quick site survey with a notebook can be a persuasive prelude to a wireless upgrade, then you step in with some solutions.

MIMO (multiple input multiple output) technology uses the different latencies caused by wireless signals bouncing off of objects to create multiple data paths that the MIMO access point in turn send/receives on and processes in parallel. While Pre-N is an unofficial format not backed by an industry specification, most home-based users won't care. What they will care about is the doubling or quadrupling of 802.11g throughput and the doubling or tripling of reception range. With Pre-N, the odds of dead or slow spots in an average sized house are virtually eliminated. Belkin was first to market with a Pre-N router and PC Card, but NETGEAR and others have now followed suit.

Some people advocate repeaters for extending wireless coverage, but I don't because each step in a repeater series halves the available bandwidth. Thus while clients connected to the router might run at 30 Mbps, those connected to the first repeater would only get around 15 Mbps, those connected to the second would get 7.5 Mbps, and so on.

A better, simpler approach is merely to boost the signal strength of existing hardware with amplified antennae, such as the EZ Connect units from SMC. The SMCHMANT-4, for example, is an omnidirectional antenna that boosts any 2.4 GHz access point or router from 2 dBi up to 4 dBi, yielding a network coverage increase of about 20 percent. The directional SMCHMANT-6 steps up to 6 dBi for a 50% increase. (D-Link's ANT24-0700 is a 7 dBi omnidirectional model if you need even more power.) Note that these antennae feature universal connectors, so they can work not only on routers and access points with removable SMA or TNC antennae but also on several desktop wireless NICs.

One wireless area that is almost entirely overlooked is outdoor connectivity that doesn't pertain to running a commercial hot spot. This is a great, low-cost way for businesses in proximate buildings to maintain a contiguous network. It's also a must-have for neighbors into gaming or for those with large yards to maintain connectivity throughout their property. The perfect example of a solution for such needs is D-Link's DWL-7700AP. This dualband (802.11a/b/g) unit can serve in four modes: access point, point-to-point bridge, point-to-multipoint bridge, or wireless client. Built like a tank in its diecast, watertight enclosure, the 7700AP features an integrated temperature sensor and heater a well as Power-over-Ethernet compatibility, so you only need to run one LAN cable to the device. The unit sports the same Web-based onboard configuration options, including WEP and WPA, found in D-Link's standard desktop APs.

Sometimes, a client might need to achieve a wireless reach measured in blocks or even miles. I ran into this situation personally a couple of years ago when a friend who lived three blocks from me wanted to bridge our Xboxes so we could play head-to-head. (As it turned out, this was impossible, although we were able to compete with PC-based games just fine.) The solution we finally hit on was a pair of Hawking Technology H-AO14SD 14 dBi directional antennae. We each mounted one on our roof so that the signal skimmed just over the tops of the houses between us. I connected my antenna to a Wi-Fi access point and he connected his to a Wi-Fi bridge. (At first, he tried connecting to a router, which had the immediate effect of crashing both of our networks.) Mounting the outdoor gear, crawling through attic insulation, and stringing wires back into our offices was a massive pain that no normal consumer would ever attempt, but this is exactly why such upgrades are a terrific opportunity for resellers. You have the know-how. You just need to bring the ladder and charge appropriately.

"It sucks," Reseller Advocate's design manager, Andrew Sametz, informed me. "LCD technology has just been rammed down people's throats for the last few years. Manufacturers say they have a wider color gamut, and they do. But tilting your head five degrees off center makes noticeable color shifts. You tilt this way and it turns pink. Tilt that way and it's blue. So even though you run these calibrators to profile your monitor, the calibrator mounts at zero degrees, which isn't much use if you move your head off-center."

Color correction is one of those essential fields that few people know about but many people can benefit from. In a nutshell, not having calibrated color is a bit like being color blind. We know that stop signs are a very specific color of red. That red tone carries with it a certain set of subliminal associations. Now imagine you take a picture of a stop sign. The camera's sensor skews the color a bit. You bring the image into your PC, and your monitor skews the color some more, so as you adjust color levels, you're actually trying to recreate a red color on the monitor that does not match the red in the digital file. Print the image on the printer and the color skews once again. In the end, it's entirely possible that the red you've slaved over in your creation is wildly divergent from the red you originally saw before snapping that picture, and as a result the image is a flop.

Here's another example. According to IDC, 24 million digital cameras sold in the U.S. in 2004, up 30% from 2003. That should give some indication of digital photography's mounting popularity. But say you find some old negatives in a closet shoe box of your family from 30 years ago. With the help of a film scanner, you obtain a hi-res digital image of some choice shot, but the image is faded and yellowed. (Scanners are great for hosing color, too.) Color correction is what you need to get that image back to looking like it was taken that morning—or noon or evening, depending on how you want to tweak the color.

Color correction is suited to a wide variety of people: photographers, graphics professionals, and video editors are the obvious targets. Then there are textile designers, small business marketers in charge of producing their own promotions, and interior decorators. Decorators may seem like an odd niche, but consider how many people out there are serious, or perhaps fanatical, about color matching room elements. One representative for color systems provider Pantone (www.pantone.com) said that she knew of a customer who had used the company's $239 Color Cue, a handheld spectro-colorimeter, to take an accurate color reading from a wall and then use that to come up with a precise match for the pillow fabric.

There are many pieces involved in end-to-end color calibration. One of these would be a monitor colorimeter (commonly called a puck) and calibrator, such as Pantone's $279 Spyder2PRO. If your clients decide on a CRT to avoid the color shifts described above, keep in mind that most monitor electron guns weaken over time, and not all guns degrade at the same rate. (Sametz notes that Trinitron invar shadow mask-based CRTs tend not to diminish in brightness as much as many competitors). Thus regular recalibration becomes necessary particularly on CRTs, although LCD backlights can shift in intensity, as well.

If you're like most people and are new to color calibration, there are a few must-read books that can help raise your expertise in a hurry. "The Adobe Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby will get you proficient in handling color in digital photography through the tools in Photoshop. Once you have these basics under your belt, step up to "Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction" by Dan Margulis. This book was written for the Photoshop 7 generation, but the color principles and techniques covered remain unchanged. Not least of all, consider "Real World Color Management" by Fraser, Bunting, and Murphy. Geeky stuff, but very comprehensive.

I'm willing to bet that you don't move many X800- or 6800-family video cards. Why would you? The buyers willing to pay $400 and up for a graphics card—and that's less than 3% of the graphics market—knows the product backward and forward. He's read the reviews, knows the frame rates the GPU should pull down in his favorite games at his favorite settings, and knows the three lowest online prices to land the card after shipping. There's no room for you in that purchase, nowhere you can step in and add value. Yet we at RAM are often as guilty as the rest of the press at focusing on the latest product releases along with their attendant speeds and feeds.

No, the real graphics money is in the mid-range. The low-end (sub-$50) has been swallowed by IGP motherboards. Or if it isn't entirely swallowed yet, it will be by the third quarter when IGP boards from ATI and NVIDIA, not to mention Intel, are in full production, and there isn't a ton of money to be had in motherboards.

The mid-range is for users, not enthusiasts. To draw an analogy, these are people who like sporty cars but get them serviced at Jiffy Lube. They do all the usual Internet and productivity apps, but they also do video editing and some Photoshop and probably a handful of intensive games every so often. The difference in gaming is competition versus entertainment. The press conveys the message that if you want to play DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2, you need a $400 card. Well, NVIDIA's 6600GT sells for well under $200 and plays DOOM 3 at 1024 x 768, high quality at over 75 fps. Half-Life 2 at the same resolution with 4xAA and 8xAF yields over 70 fps. If you're so good that milliseconds matter to survival and gaming is your chief joy in life, then sure, a $400 or $500 is called for. But keep in mind that to the rest of the world, anything over 30 fps looks like realistic, fluid motion. Even a regular 6600 card doesn't drop under 30 fps in most cases until passing 1280 x 1024 resolution with filtering, and the 6600 costs $50 less than the GT. Even the 128-bit 6200 card (roughly $100) holds above 30 fps at 1024 x 768.

So we can agree that the mid-range is the sweet spot for graphics card sales. Where are you going to find buyers? Why, all of the people who bought IGP boards for the holidays. They bought on a budget but have now had a few months to work up some disposable income. They walk by the racks of hottest PC games in Target and Wal-Mart every day. They have friends who do amazing photo and video projects. A little flier in the mail announcing "the arrival of hot graphics technology at unbelievably low prices, come in for a demonstration of how this can reshape your computing experience and extend your PC investment" just might work wonders.

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