Best Pc for basic business functions.

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N1sh

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What would be the best Pc to get for a smallish home business? It would deal with mostly Word and Excel documents, running accounting software and little bit of image editing.

I was thinking along the lines of:

E2200
2 gigs DDR2 800
basic G31 mobo
250 GIG SATA2 HDD
250W PSU
Basic case
 
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Think if you increase ram to 4 gigs and change cpu to E1400 it'll also work.

Some people will say you dont need that much ram but it helps a lot with all the word documents, spread sheets, long list of emails etc.

And CPU, a basic celeron dual core will be sufficient for office work
 
From my experience reliability is a businesses No. 1 priority, so it's more important who makes the components than what they are. Your specs seem fine, I don't think you need more RAM, and my suggestions on manufacturers are:

Intel chip
Intel board
Kingston RAM
Seagate drive

And a big airy case with a reliable PSU

If it was my office, the only decision left would be DVI or VGA for the on board graphics. Folks don't realise how much quicker you work in Excel on a 24" monitor, when you can see 1 800 cells at once.
 
My advice would be to by an HP. A lot of people will disagree, and say its overpriced. However, the build quality is second to none, and tier one PC manufactures have a lower failure rate; and it comes with a three year, on site warranty. Also four gigs of RAM is too much, two should be fine for most office applications (even one with XP should be OK).
 
4 gigs of ram is the new standard, especially with win64 (win7 and vista)

But then again you can always upgrade later.

Take the dual monitor advice, get like a hd3450 or something too, much easier working with dual monitors
 
Conradl said:
My advice would be to by an HP. A lot of people will disagree, and say its overpriced. However, the build quality is second to none, and tier one PC manufactures have a lower failure rate; and it comes with a three year, on site warranty. Also four gigs of RAM is too much, two should be fine for most office applications (even one with XP should be OK).
Click to expand...

My experience has been the exact opposite. You buy a tier one brand PC for a few reasons: Pre tested setups, reliability, and backup. HP reliability and backup sucks big. I've got a few notebooks and desktops of theirs, and when they break, you cry. One in four desktops arrived DOA, none of the four's 3.5" floppy drives worked until I replaced them with OEM units, the notebook took two months to be fixed after it died just a month after I got it. And that's just the hardware.

Microsoft palms off OEM Windows support to the OEM. Now I don't expect the one man PC shop down the road to offer top level OS support on their PCs, but I do expect a tier one manufacturer to, and again HP fails dismally. That's if you have the patience to sit for half an hour for your call to be answered.

I'll never touch HP again. If you've got the skill to assemble a system yourself, do it that way. That's why I recommend Intel boards, they work with Windows out of the box. I've never had a days trouble with any of my self built PCs, and I thank Intel boards for that.

PostmanPot, you wont appreciate a 24" monitor in business until you open a 30 column spreadsheet. Then you wont know how you lived so long without one. But I do agree with you if you were referring to an external graphics card for a business machine, that's just not necessary. If you need dual DVI output, get a board that offers that onboard.
 
Yeah, you hear these horror stories. I worked at a company that refreshed 2000 HP desktops and sent back 4.

I worked at another company that used old 486 compaq machines. Ten years after buying them, they still worked fine, in some of the toughest conditions I have ever worked in. We were replacing clone PIIs with clone PIIIs and the compaq 486s just carried on working - so I guess I'm a fan....
 
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