Definition: A term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create,
store, exchange and utilize information in its various forms
including business data, conversations, still images, motion
pictures and multimedia presentations
When it comes to technology and your business, you'll need to
know enough about the topic to understand what your business needs
and why. And while you won't need to be able to disassemble and
reassemble a PC against a stopwatch like a Marine does his M-16,
you'll want to know a little more than simply how to turn on your
computer and then launch your favorite programs.
Computers and peripherals are constantly evolving, but knowing a
few general specifications in each product category will help you
find the best deal on the right equipment for your business--or at
least understand what a tech expert is telling you. And what a
business needs is not the same for everyone. There's no one "right"
PC brand or printer type any more than there's one right car for
everyone out on the road today.
Your business will have its own unique set of equipment needs
that probably differ from those of the company next door. And, of
course, you'll have a different amount of money to spend.
When it comes to pricing, the good news is that prices for
office equipment have gone down every year during the past three
decades, while features have continued to improve with every new
version of hardware and software that's released. That's been true
in every product category every year, so you can expect to get a
better price and a more capable bundle of equipment than you could
have found this time last year.
Also, you can expect your computer and telecommunications
equipment to be your best business allies. As we've evolved from an
industrial to an information-based economy, small businesses have
used their office tools to be more competitive against larger
businesses, which--let's face it--have a lot of built-in market
advantages.
Getting Started
Let's start by behaving as if you're already a Fortune 500
company--in miniature. Over the decades, large businesses have
learned quite a bit about getting the most out of their office
equipment. The first lesson is: You don't buy equipment; you buy
systems.
As you shop for PCs, fax machines and phones, keep in mind that
the goal is to make all this equipment work well together and, to
the extent possible, talk to one another--that is, share data. If
your personal digital assistant (PDA) can't easily transfer data to
your desktop, your fax machine can't accept computer files, or
you're building contact lists and address books in a lot of
different and incompatible applications, you're duplicating your
efforts, which means you're losing time. Efficiency today means
being well connected--both inside and outside the walls of your
company.
Even if you start off as a solo operator working from a home
office, you're still going to need connections to clients and
suppliers in the wider world. That not only means phone, fax and
internet connections, but also some level of connectivity in the
applications that make them work--e-mail, instant messaging, web
protocols and more.
At some point, you may want to share proposals, spreadsheets and
other files--not only among co-workers but possibly customers and
suppliers as well. That suggests you'll want to stick with the most
popular operating systems and applications to improve your chances
of collaboration with others. Certainly, you'll want to do that
within your own company.
Incidentally, even if you're starting as a solo operator, you'll
need at least two connected computers. And if you're like many
businesspeople today, you probably already own three or four
"computing devices"--PC, laptop, PDA, cell phone--with a lot of
wired and/or wireless connections among them and your other office
equipment.
But why two desktop computers? Actually, one of those could be a
laptop for travel. But you need two because of that inevitable day
when your hard drive crashes or your computer gets a virus or
there's some inscrutable problem with your PC's on/off
button--whatever. Your PC is likely to become the heart and soul of
your operation, and while computer equipment is very durable, all
equipment fails.
So what will you do when that machine that holds your critical
business information fails? Even if you're among that small
fraction of people who back up their data religiously and have it
available somewhere on tape or CD-ROM, how long will it take you to
run out and buy a new PC and add all the software you regularly use
configured just the way you like it so you can start loading that
data? How many hours or days can your business go before you get
back online with your customers?
Realistically, you don't want even one hour of lost
productivity. At a minimum, you need at least one duplicate of your
main PC's entire setup that you can immediately turn to without
losing a step. As mentioned, that duplicate image could be a laptop
used for travel. Ideally, it will be another desktop just as
capable or nearly so as your first.
That second computer doesn't have to sit idle until an
emergency. It can be working in the meantime to help carry the
computing load on your local area network (LAN)--and, for that
matter, your wide area network, which includes your connection to
the internet and your website.
Networking lets you share computing power and divvy up your
workload among different systems. For example, as companies grow,
they often find it cheaper and more convenient to keep master
copies of software and even data on a central PC and give each
employee's workstation access to more or less of it, depending on
the employee's access privileges.
It's also often convenient to get your printer, fax and scanner
off your desk by attaching them to a second PC that can accept jobs
from all the other PCs on the network. Another increasingly common
use of a second PC is as a communications server to your e-commerce
web site and to house the several e-mail boxes and instant
messaging archives you and co-workers will collect.
So you need to start shopping, not for computers, but for a
network for your computers. That's not as complicated as it sounds,
especially since Windows and other popular operating systems have
networking capabilities built in these days. At the LAN level, that
will be over an Ethernet connection. You'll also want to connect
smaller devices to your network via various wired or wireless
protocols that will be built into your different devices.
As mentioned, if you travel or work at home and the office or
different spots around your home, you may prefer that your second
computer be a laptop. Portables come in all shapes and sizes today,
and you can easily find one powerful enough to perform any or all
of the desktop duties described above.
Any PC that delivers data and other services to multiple devices
is called a "server." The word "server" is also used to refer to
the operating system--software like Windows 2000 or its successor,
Windows XP. These operating systems include all the features you'll
need to connect your server to other computers, sometimes called
"clients."
The traditional way to create your LAN is to string very
inexpensive Category 5 cable (it looks a lot like the typical phone
line on steroids) between the Ethernet adapters of two or more PCs.
You may need to buy a small and inexpensive Ethernet card to plug
in to one or more of your PCs if any of them is either old or
cheap. But the easier approach is to make built-in Ethernet a
must-have on your PC shopping list. (As a matter of fact, Ethernet
has become such a common feature of today's business-class PCs that
it may not even cost you extra for the ability to transfer data at
10 or 100 megabits per second.)
Easier still is to network your PCs wirelessly using 802.11 or
Wi-Fi network adapters. These come in a variety of adapter types
and connect to your PC in different ways. Similarly, unable to
accept an Ethernet card, some small devices like PDAs and cell
phones rely on the wireless Bluetooth or Infrared communication
methodologies.
Choosing a PC
When it comes to selecting the right computer for your business,
you need to make sure you're looking at the business-class PCs.
What exactly is a business-class PC? In brief, it's one that
includes various connectivity components like built-in Ethernet and
the software utilities to manage networking, as well as the slots,
bays and ports needed to expand memory, storage and business
peripherals.
A business-class PC isn't necessarily more expensive than
today's well-equipped home computers, but it's not the cheapest PC
you can buy, either. In its standard configuration, it's priced in
the midrange. But you don't necessarily want to buy the standard
configuration.
While high-end consumer systems focus on multimedia
entertainment, gaming and other recreational activities, a business
user's money is better spent getting just a little more of all the
standard stuff. You want more memory, more storage, and a
higher-resolution or larger display, because all these things not
only make computing more pleasant, but also enhance your
productivity.
They can help you do more in less time, and if you're in
business, time is money. Waiting for databases to update,
insufficient memory errors, waiting for web pages to download-these
things waste your time. You want to have the best business
productivity enhancer you can afford.
PC components change pretty quickly--always for the better. It's
hard to take a snapshot of PC functionality that won't go out of
date right away. But we can give you a few guidelines:
CPU. Starting with the brains of the computer or the
central processing unit, you'll want your systems powered by
nothing less than an Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent Athlon XP class
processor from Advanced Micro Devices as opposed to, say, Celrons,
Durons, Pentium IIIs or earlier generations. System clock speeds
have been soaring higher in recent years, so you shouldn't invest
in anything less than a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP 2100+ machine
with 512KB of on-chip cache memory and 400MHz frontside bus for
processor-to-memory transfers. On-chip cache is critically
important to your processor's performance.
RAM. Random Access Memory is also critically important.
Considerably slower and cheaper than cache, RAM is the bucket your
computer's processor uses to hold vast amounts of data and program
instructions while it works. The standard amount of RAM is always
climbing as the programs we use become ever more ambitious.
Consider 512MB to be the minimum for a business-class PC, and you
really should have 1GB. Here's where the price of your PC jumps the
most. But adding memory is the single-most beneficial thing you can
to enhance your PC's performance.
Hard drive. One or more physical hard drives, each of
which can be divided into multiple logical drives, are the
warehouses where you store multimegabyte programs and gigabytes
worth of data. This is the permanent storage location of your
programs and files, and, if only because they are so inexpensive,
there's no reason to have a PC with less than 80GB of storage. The
real price differential comes with the speed at which the platters
in your hard drive spin. Another productivity enhancer: Make sure
you don't buy anything slower than a 7200RPM drive.
Optical drive. It's pretty hard to find a computer
without a CD-ROM drive these days. In fact, it's hard to find one
without a rewritable CD. But time marches on, and today it's
preferable to have a rewritable DVD in your PC. For starters, DVD
platters hold 4.3GB instead of the 650MB of CD-ROMs. That's enough
to hold a first-run movie, although the principal business
application is to copy all your hard drive data onto one or more
rewritable DVD discs and then store them off-site. Of all your
backup alternatives, none is so reliable, so durable and so cheap
as simply copying the contents of your hard drives to an optical
drive. Any of the popular DVD rewriting methods will be able to
read your CD-ROM discs as well.
Display. To put it bluntly, monitors are dead. Long live
liquid crystal displays (LCDs). These thin-line, low-power
alternatives to the hot, bulky monitor are still a good deal more
expensive to buy. But prices are falling fast, and they not only
save a huge amount of desktop space, but also enough in power and
cooling costs over a traditional monitor that they are actually
cheaper in the long run. A 15-inch LCD is the viewing equivalent of
a 17-inch monitor but has a higher resolution and is easier on the
eyes. Depending on features, it should cost $300 to $400. Spend a
couple hundred dollars more, and a 17-inch LCD will provide higher
resolution and contrast, and a wider viewing angle for, say, group
presentations. Either is cheapest when purchased from a discount
warehouse store separate from your PC.
Modem. One of your best business investments today is
broadband Internet access. Depending on your location, that could
be via a phone company's T1, ATM fiber relay or DSL, or the same
cable that brings content to your TV. At the very least, your PC is
likely to include a 56K modem for connections over a phone line, at
least as an available option. Not much to think about there except,
even if you have a broadband connection, the $30 to $50 you'll need
to spend to get a 56K modem is well worth it in the event your
broadband connection fails.
While nothing prevents you from buying parts at a computer
retailer and building your own PC from the motherboard up, you'll
find that the economics argue against that. Likewise, upgrades of
your PC's CPU seldom make good economic sense anymore with new PC
prices so low.
But it's still relatively easy and economically feasible to add
memory, storage and peripherals. Make sure your new PC has free
memory sockets, drive bays, PCI peripheral slots and ports.
Usually, all these become more bountiful as you move from a desktop
to minitower to full tower case. But there are some upgrade
possibilities you should demand in even the smallest computer:
Memory. Always insist that all the initial memory on a
new PC be included on a single DIMM (dual inline memory module).
Insist on at least one open memory slot.
Storage. It's hard to say which is happening faster--the growth
in hard-drive capacity or the fall in hard-drive prices. We measure
storage in gigabytes these days, and you should be able to add
another 80GB of storage for less than $100. While more is always
better, at the very least, insist that your new PC have one free
internal 3.5-inch storage bay that can accept another hard drive.
Also insist on at least one externally available 5.25-inch drive
bay into which you may want to add another kind of optical drive
than the one that will ship with your PC.
Peripherals. You never know whether you may choose to add
a different graphics adapter, a wireless networking card, a board
for an external storage device or scanner, or who knows. Insist on
two open PCI slots on even the smallest desktops.
Ports. Increasingly, the things that hang off your
PC--mice, trackballs, keyboards, still and video cameras, external
drives, printers and scanners--are relying on the new
high-bandwidth FireWire and USB 2.0 ports, especially the latter.
They often replace legacy serial, parallel and PS/2
ports--sometimes even PCI slots. No need to give up legacy
connections yet, but make sure your PC still has a half-dozen USB
2.0 ports both front and back. If you're lucky, you may also find a
Windows PC with a built-in FireWire port for multimedia
connections. Add-on FireWire or USB 2.0 hubs will only put you back
about cost $50 to $100.