When it comes to technology and your business, you’ll need toknow enough about the topic to understand what your business needsand why. And while you won’t need to be able to disassemble andreassemble 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 yourcomputer and then launch your favorite programs.
Computers and peripherals are constantly evolving, but knowing afew general specifications in each product category will help youfind the best deal on the right equipment for your business–or atleast understand what a tech expert is telling you. And what abusiness 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 foreveryone out on the road today.
Your business will have its own unique set of equipment needsthat probably differ from those of the company next door. And, ofcourse, you’ll have a different amount of money to spend.
When it comes to pricing, the good news is that prices foroffice equipment have gone down every year during the past threedecades, while features have continued to improve with every newversion of hardware and software that’s released. That’s been truein every product category every year, so you can expect to get abetter price and a more capable bundle of equipment than you couldhave found this time last year.
Also, you can expect your computer and telecommunicationsequipment to be your best business allies. As we’ve evolved from anindustrial to an information-based economy, small businesses haveused their office tools to be more competitive against largerbusinesses, which–let’s face it–have a lot of built-in marketadvantages.
Getting Started
Let’s start by behaving as if you’re already a Fortune 500company–in miniature. Over the decades, large businesses havelearned quite a bit about getting the most out of their officeequipment. The first lesson is: You don’t buy equipment; you buysystems.
As you shop for PCs, fax machines and phones, keep in mind thatthe goal is to make all this equipment work well together and, tothe extent possible, talk to one another–that is, share data. Ifyour personal digital assistant (PDA) can’t easily transfer data toyour desktop, your fax machine can’t accept computer files, oryou’re building contact lists and address books in a lot ofdifferent and incompatible applications, you’re duplicating yourefforts, which means you’re losing time. Efficiency today meansbeing well connected–both inside and outside the walls of yourcompany.
Even if you start off as a solo operator working from a homeoffice, you’re still going to need connections to clients andsuppliers in the wider world. That not only means phone, fax andinternet connections, but also some level of connectivity in theapplications that make them work–e-mail, instant messaging, webprotocols and more.
At some point, you may want to share proposals, spreadsheets andother files–not only among co-workers but possibly customers andsuppliers as well. That suggests you’ll want to stick with the mostpopular operating systems and applications to improve your chancesof collaboration with others. Certainly, you’ll want to do thatwithin your own company.
Incidentally, even if you’re starting as a solo operator, you’llneed at least two connected computers. And if you’re like manybusinesspeople today, you probably already own three or four”computing devices”–PC, laptop, PDA, cell phone–with a lot ofwired and/or wireless connections among them and your other officeequipment.
But why two desktop computers? Actually, one of those could be alaptop for travel. But you need two because of that inevitable daywhen your hard drive crashes or your computer gets a virus orthere’s some inscrutable problem with your PC’s on/offbutton–whatever. Your PC is likely to become the heart and soul ofyour operation, and while computer equipment is very durable, allequipment fails.
So what will you do when that machine that holds your criticalbusiness information fails? Even if you’re among that smallfraction of people who back up their data religiously and have itavailable somewhere on tape or CD-ROM, how long will it take you torun out and buy a new PC and add all the software you regularly useconfigured just the way you like it so you can start loading thatdata? How many hours or days can your business go before you getback online with your customers?
Realistically, you don’t want even one hour of lostproductivity. At a minimum, you need at least one duplicate of yourmain PC’s entire setup that you can immediately turn to withoutlosing a step. As mentioned, that duplicate image could be a laptopused for travel. Ideally, it will be another desktop just ascapable or nearly so as your first.
That second computer doesn’t have to sit idle until anemergency. It can be working in the meantime to help carry thecomputing load on your local area network (LAN)–and, for thatmatter, your wide area network, which includes your connection tothe internet and your website.
Networking lets you share computing power and divvy up yourworkload among different systems. For example, as companies grow,they often find it cheaper and more convenient to keep mastercopies of software and even data on a central PC and give eachemployee’s workstation access to more or less of it, depending onthe employee’s access privileges.
It’s also often convenient to get your printer, fax and scanneroff your desk by attaching them to a second PC that can accept jobsfrom all the other PCs on the network. Another increasingly commonuse of a second PC is as a communications server to your e-commerceweb site and to house the several e-mail boxes and instantmessaging archives you and co-workers will collect.
So you need to start shopping, not for computers, but for anetwork for your computers. That’s not as complicated as it sounds,especially since Windows and other popular operating systems havenetworking capabilities built in these days. At the LAN level, thatwill be over an Ethernet connection. You’ll also want to connectsmaller devices to your network via various wired or wirelessprotocols that will be built into your different devices.
As mentioned, if you travel or work at home and the office ordifferent spots around your home, you may prefer that your secondcomputer be a laptop. Portables come in all shapes and sizes today,and you can easily find one powerful enough to perform any or allof the desktop duties described above.
Any PC that delivers data and other services to multiple devicesis called a “server.” The word “server” is also used to refer tothe operating system–software like Windows 2000 or its successor,Windows XP. These operating systems include all the features you’llneed to connect your server to other computers, sometimes called”clients.”
The traditional way to create your LAN is to string veryinexpensive Category 5 cable (it looks a lot like the typical phoneline on steroids) between the Ethernet adapters of two or more PCs.You may need to buy a small and inexpensive Ethernet card to plugin to one or more of your PCs if any of them is either old orcheap. But the easier approach is to make built-in Ethernet amust-have on your PC shopping list. (As a matter of fact, Ethernethas become such a common feature of today’s business-class PCs thatit may not even cost you extra for the ability to transfer data at10 or 100 megabits per second.)
Easier still is to network your PCs wirelessly using 802.11 orWi-Fi network adapters. These come in a variety of adapter typesand connect to your PC in different ways. Similarly, unable toaccept an Ethernet card, some small devices like PDAs and cellphones rely on the wireless Bluetooth or Infrared communicationmethodologies.
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 thatincludes various connectivity components like built-in Ethernet andthe software utilities to manage networking, as well as the slots,bays and ports needed to expand memory, storage and businessperipherals.
A business-class PC isn’t necessarily more expensive thantoday’s well-equipped home computers, but it’s not the cheapest PCyou can buy, either. In its standard configuration, it’s priced inthe midrange. But you don’t necessarily want to buy the standardconfiguration.
While high-end consumer systems focus on multimediaentertainment, gaming and other recreational activities, a businessuser’s money is better spent getting just a little more of all thestandard stuff. You want more memory, more storage, and ahigher-resolution or larger display, because all these things notonly make computing more pleasant, but also enhance yourproductivity.
They can help you do more in less time, and if you’re inbusiness, time is money. Waiting for databases to update,insufficient memory errors, waiting for web pages to download-thesethings waste your time. You want to have the best businessproductivity enhancer you can afford.
PC components change pretty quickly–always for the better. It’shard to take a snapshot of PC functionality that won’t go out ofdate right away. But we can give you a few guidelines:
CPU. Starting with the brains of the computer or thecentral processing unit, you’ll want your systems powered bynothing less than an Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent Athlon XP classprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices as opposed to, say, Celrons,Durons, Pentium IIIs or earlier generations. System clock speedshave been soaring higher in recent years, so you shouldn’t investin anything less than a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP 2100+ machinewith 512KB of on-chip cache memory and 400MHz frontside bus forprocessor-to-memory transfers. On-chip cache is criticallyimportant to your processor’s performance.
RAM. Random Access Memory is also critically important.Considerably slower and cheaper than cache, RAM is the bucket yourcomputer’s processor uses to hold vast amounts of data and programinstructions while it works. The standard amount of RAM is alwaysclimbing as the programs we use become ever more ambitious.Consider 512MB to be the minimum for a business-class PC, and youreally should have 1GB. Here’s where the price of your PC jumps themost. But adding memory is the single-most beneficial thing you canto enhance your PC’s performance.
Hard drive. One or more physical hard drives, each ofwhich can be divided into multiple logical drives, are thewarehouses where you store multimegabyte programs and gigabytesworth of data. This is the permanent storage location of yourprograms and files, and, if only because they are so inexpensive,there’s no reason to have a PC with less than 80GB of storage. Thereal price differential comes with the speed at which the plattersin your hard drive spin. Another productivity enhancer: Make sureyou don’t buy anything slower than a 7200RPM drive.
Optical drive. It’s pretty hard to find a computerwithout a CD-ROM drive these days. In fact, it’s hard to find onewithout a rewritable CD. But time marches on, and today it’spreferable to have a rewritable DVD in your PC. For starters, DVDplatters hold 4.3GB instead of the 650MB of CD-ROMs. That’s enoughto hold a first-run movie, although the principal businessapplication is to copy all your hard drive data onto one or morerewritable DVD discs and then store them off-site. Of all yourbackup alternatives, none is so reliable, so durable and so cheapas simply copying the contents of your hard drives to an opticaldrive. Any of the popular DVD rewriting methods will be able toread your CD-ROM discs as well.
Display. To put it bluntly, monitors are dead. Long liveliquid crystal displays (LCDs). These thin-line, low-poweralternatives to the hot, bulky monitor are still a good deal moreexpensive to buy. But prices are falling fast, and they not onlysave a huge amount of desktop space, but also enough in power andcooling costs over a traditional monitor that they are actuallycheaper in the long run. A 15-inch LCD is the viewing equivalent ofa 17-inch monitor but has a higher resolution and is easier on theeyes. Depending on features, it should cost $300 to $400. Spend acouple hundred dollars more, and a 17-inch LCD will provide higherresolution and contrast, and a wider viewing angle for, say, grouppresentations. Either is cheapest when purchased from a discountwarehouse store separate from your PC.
Modem. One of your best business investments today isbroadband Internet access. Depending on your location, that couldbe via a phone company’s T1, ATM fiber relay or DSL, or the samecable that brings content to your TV. At the very least, your PC islikely to include a 56K modem for connections over a phone line, atleast as an available option. Not much to think about there except,even if you have a broadband connection, the $30 to $50 you’ll needto spend to get a 56K modem is well worth it in the event yourbroadband connection fails.
While nothing prevents you from buying parts at a computerretailer and building your own PC from the motherboard up, you’llfind that the economics argue against that. Likewise, upgrades ofyour PC’s CPU seldom make good economic sense anymore with new PCprices so low.
But it’s still relatively easy and economically feasible to addmemory, storage and peripherals. Make sure your new PC has freememory sockets, drive bays, PCI peripheral slots and ports.Usually, all these become more bountiful as you move from a desktopto minitower to full tower case. But there are some upgradepossibilities you should demand in even the smallest computer:
Memory. Always insist that all the initial memory on anew 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 growthin hard-drive capacity or the fall in hard-drive prices. We measurestorage in gigabytes these days, and you should be able to addanother 80GB of storage for less than $100. While more is alwaysbetter, at the very least, insist that your new PC have one freeinternal 3.5-inch storage bay that can accept another hard drive.Also insist on at least one externally available 5.25-inch drivebay into which you may want to add another kind of optical drivethan the one that will ship with your PC.
Peripherals. You never know whether you may choose to adda different graphics adapter, a wireless networking card, a boardfor an external storage device or scanner, or who knows. Insist ontwo open PCI slots on even the smallest desktops.
Ports. Increasingly, the things that hang off yourPC–mice, trackballs, keyboards, still and video cameras, externaldrives, printers and scanners–are relying on the newhigh-bandwidth FireWire and USB 2.0 ports, especially the latter.They often replace legacy serial, parallel and PS/2ports–sometimes even PCI slots. No need to give up legacyconnections yet, but make sure your PC still has a half-dozen USB2.0 ports both front and back. If you’re lucky, you may also find aWindows PC with a built-in FireWire port for multimediaconnections. Add-on FireWire or USB 2.0 hubs will only put you backabout cost $50 to $100.
