• Don’t buy any more movies on DVD or Blu-Ray -  Their rationale for this is that DVDs immediately begin to lose value, and unless you are going to watch them more than once a year, you might as well rent. At the forefront of renting is Netflix, which will send movies to your door, or stream them to you.
• Don’t rent movies – Why not go a step farther and stop renting entirely? They suggest a DVD sharing club with your friends. But, with Netflix at a minimum $4.99 for 2 movies per month(1 at a time), $8.99 for unlimited(1 movie at a time), more for Blu-Ray, this idea might work. We’ve recently considered trying another option we find interesting, DVDXpress. For those of you who haven’t seen this, these are rentable DVD Kiosks installed at supermarkets. Real-time inventory is available online. The only downside compared to Netflix is a limited selection, but if you have a desire for a more recent movie with no commitment and limited price, it isn’t a bad option. Also…remember this thing called your local library? They often have movie sections of their own.
• Drop your cable/satellite plan – We stopped using rabbit ears at home when reception got too bad(ironically when cable wired up the neighborhood, can you say conspiracy). But recently, as an experiment, we hooked up the old roof antenna to check out digital over-the-air programming, and assuming you are in the right position to get it, the quality on broadcast station rivals that of those same stations on cable, due to bandwidth. Also, as we’ve recently written(Streaming Video Part 1 and Part 2), the internet is full of entertainment. Hulu, Youtube, Google Video, Joost, etc. Turn an old computer into a media center for your television or buy one of the new hardware options for the same(more on this in a future post).
• Drop your phones – Many people are dropping their landline phones, using a cell phone for their primary. There is also the option of internet phone services of various types to back this up. We used to get horrible cell service in our own home, thus making this option less viable.
• Turn off your electronics when not in use – Our discussion of this issue can be found here. There are a variety of options for power-saving you can explore. We went from keeping all of our multiple systems and peripherals on to one server operating 24/7 and the remaining computers booting on demand. We’ve altered the server to use more energy efficient hard drives, switched to a lower watt processor and enabled frequency scaling to lower its power usage when idle, and went with an energy efficient lower watt power supply, and have taken to turning off peripherals such as printers when not in use.

Do you have any suggestions of your own? Why not comment? Wired goes in, in a future article to suggest we rid ourselves of several ‘useless’ gadgets that we can throw in the trash, thus saving us money. These include:

• Printers – We can’t disagree that unless you need it, expensive printers and their inks are an unnecessary luxury. For photo printing, a local store or online service will print your photos with much better results than a home system, and likely less per image when you add up costs. There is a good case for keeping a cheap printer for documents, as one cannot avoid the occasional printing job, but with technology the way it is, you can bring most electronic documents with you if you have a cell phone or organizer and minimize its costs
• Scanners – Except for artists, scanners also have become an unnecessary item. The popularity of digital cameras have eliminated the use most people used it for. For textual scanning…more things are available in a digital format each day. Let the professionals scan it for you.

That said, we do own an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax. Printers are so cheap nowadays that we can justify it. It sits in a corner and does very little, and we’ve never used it for photo printing, and while we’ve used the copy function, we’ve never even used the scanner function(although we’ve meant to in order to scan and rid ourselves of important papers we still need to keep). As for reading on a screen…for some things you still want a book. So far, none of the electronic reading options reproduce the book-reading experience.

• Built-In Optical Drives – This one applies mostly to laptop owners. Why lug around a built-in optical drive when hard drive and usb drive space is so inexpensive you can copy whatever you need for a trip to the drive, allowing your laptop to be much smaller. You can even keep an external USB optical drive for when it is needed. If you run desktops, at least one of them can afford an optical drive.
• Landline Phones – Mentioned above. There are still advantages to having one, even if it is run over the net. Someone we know has a landline that has no long distance plan, but is used for incoming and local calls only. If they want to call out, they use a calling card or their cell phone.
• Fax Machines – E-mail is certainly a better alternative, but there are enough businesses out there that still insist you fax documents that you’d better have access to one, even if you use an internet fax service or the local Staples. There is no need for most people to own a dedicated fax machine. We have one, but it came with the all-in-one printer(which was on sale cheap).

Ultimately, we must disagree with their article, but we think reviewing and scaling down these devices is a good idea for space and monetary savings. Keep an inexpensive all-in-one workhorse for your home office, and unless you really need it, dump the photo printer. Scale back your landline and consider VoIP alternatives.

Five years ago, we invested money in building up our systems to a level unnecessary in a home, just because we loved tech. Two years ago, we started scaling back, reconsidering extravagances, getting rid of unnecessary things. And we continue to do periodic reviews…ask yourself this…

• How can I accomplish the same amount of things with less equipment?
• Do I really need this (insert device/function)?