Many of you won't be buying your business computer systems yourselves; you likely have an IT person or two to do the dirty work. Mainly you need to understand what they're buying and why.
So let's see what a standard business system looks like, decipher some of the jargon, and offer you enough info to reassure yourself that your systems people are making sound purchases in your name. (Or give you a clue to when they are simply madly in love with some hot new technology that you really don't need and shouldn't be paying for.)
The first important thing to keep in mind about the hardware is that you are buying a business desktop system, not a gaming system or back-office server. So you don't need to pay extra for fancy 3D graphics cards, dual-processor systems, or RAID drives. Your target is good performance for the word processing, spreadsheet, and Internet/e-mail work that your staff really spends most of their time on.
So let's start by defining a Basic Standard Business Desktop Computer System.
The typical business desktop computer is used for word processing, spreadsheet work, some slide show creation, lots of e-mail and Internet browsing, and not much that's very demanding of a modern desktop computer. So you have lots of good choices at good prices--in fact, your biggest problem is that you've got too many choices, and both options and prices vary daily or even hourly.
Here is how we recommend you configure your desktop PCs for the basic business use by the typical knowledge worker:
The AllBusiness.com Recommended Standard Business Desktop Computer
