2. Choose black and white printing over color when possible. Depending on your printer, you may have option to select grayscale printing using black ink cartridge only. If you're not doing presentation quality work, chances are you won't need other colors.

3. If you're dealing with a long document, print two sheets to a page if you can. Your printer may allow you to print two pages side by side in 'landscape' orientation -- and you'll save on paper costs too.

4. Modern personal printers can produce high quality photographs, particularly if you use specialist photo paper. But printing high quality digital shots can use a lot of ink -- so think about outsourcing your photo printing to a local print center. Many services allow you to order your prints online and can mail them to you if you can't collect them yourself. You can often have your photos printed on calendars, mouse mats or greeting cards, if you wish.

Reduce your inkjet or toner costs by economizing on ink when you can -- and keep your ink supplies ready for those occasions when high quality presentation counts.

Nigel Patterson is a business writer and the publisher of Printer Ink 2u.com.

Importantly there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, and answers may vary greatly from one vendor to another. There are however some answers that should throw up a red flag:

Question 6 - This is generally a good guage of customer satisfaction. If vendor can not provide this information, or is not willing to do so then you can anticipate a support issue or poor customer satisfaction with product.

Question 10 - You should always have ability to get to your own data. If you require a programmer to build new reports then you will consistently be biting into your ROI.

Question 14 - If vendor skirts around this issue then they are uncomfortable letting you talk to a recent customer and therefore maybe hiding something from you, perhaps a difficiency in their product or in their implementation process.

Question 15 - The answer to this question identifies how 'productised' software is. A vendor who regularly evaluates their customer's future requirements and spends money on building these into their product is committed to it's current customers. A vendor who spends money only 'as required' is probably not so committed to building a great product as they are to getting sales.

When getting answers to these questions please also consider that their may be legitmate commercial reasons as to why a question can not be answered, however at a bear minimum your vendor should be able to provide some background into their reasons for not answering.

There are another four important criteria upon which any experienced buyer will evaluate a software purchase which will be covered in future articles.