Search
Recommended Products
Related Links


 

 

Informative Articles

A "Cyber" Staffing Solution for Small Businesses
Consultants, entrepreneurs, and other independent professionals often find themselves performing a juggling act: providing their products and services while also carrying out tasks related to marketing, customer service, and day-to-day operations....

Comparison Shopping and Starting an Internet Business
Stop for a minute and think about how much we are, by nature, comparison shoppers. How many times a day do we compare things and make a decision based upon this comparison? And why is that? We could sit here and rattle off a number of...

Creating Great Charts for Persuasive Trade Show Presentations
A well-designed chart can be one of the most persuasive elements of your trade show booth display and literature. It illustrates to your customers why your product is the obvious solution to one of their specific needs. It can communicate major...

PR: Let's Cut to the Chase
If your key – that’s KEY – outside audiences don’t exhibit the kind of behaviors that lead to results like these, you need to take a closer look at your public relations effort. Results like fresh proposals for strategic alliances and ...

The Naughty Niches: Potential Gold Mines or Business Killers?
Okay, so you're looking for new ways to grow your online business and you can't help but notice all those adult oriented matchmaking sites popping up (literally) all over the place. After awhile you begin asking yourself if it's time to replace...

 
Google
How To Set Up Your Small Office Home Office And Save $1000s

When starting out in business there are great temptations to buy "the best of everything" and spend too much money in the process. This is one of the potentially devastating mistakes that new companies make and it can be a killer from the start.

It is the intention of this article to help you avoid spending thousands of unnecessary dollars when setting up your Small Office Home Office (SOHO). It addresses your PC and the software that you buy for it.

First off, think of your PC as a business tool only. Don't fall for the temptation to buy a PC that is also a game machine or a video player to watch movies with. This way, you will reduce the amount of money you spend.

Equipment You Should Have

PC - You can buy a great PC from several places including Dell, Gateway, Best Buy, and CompUSA for about $500.00. Your PC should have a minimum of a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB of memory, and a 40GB hard drive. It should include:

* A sound card or integrated sound chip. The sound card/chip will have ports for a microphone, "in-line" (which you may never need but allows for other equipment sound input) and speakers.

* A video card or integrated chip which your monitor plugs into and also drives your video display.

* USB 2.X ports. USB ports are the interfaces where USB cables plug into your computer. USB cables allow you to attach equipment like your mouse, printer, and Scanner.

* PCI slots. These are interfaces on Mother Board that allow you to add cards with customized functionality to the PC. They are also the places where video cards and sound cards are attached.

Mouse - I recommend that you get a Wireless Optical Mouse. The price of Wireless Optical Mouses (or is it Mice?) has come down so far that there is no reason to have the old kind. The convenience of being untethered from the PC cannot be adequately described.

Monitor - I still have the old fashioned CRT (TV type) of monitor but when this one goes I will get a Flat Panel Display. The prices have dropped enough to afford one.

Printer - You will need a laser or inkjet printer for everyday tasks like seeing how your web pages come out on paper. You can print ebooks or reports. Many people find it difficult to read from the


monitor and like to print much of what they read.

You can buy a good inkjet printer for about $50.00. If you do a lot of printing it will last at least one or two years.

The advantage of buying inexpensive printers is each year the manufacturers come out with new printers that are better than the previous year so you always get better quality for a lower price.

Operating System - the Operating System is the machine code software that makes your PC run. It is the brains of the PC.

It is worth the cost of Windows XP to have a PC that has thousands of compatible programs available to it.

Applications

Word Processor - You are going to need a word processor to do business. You will need to communicate with suppliers, your bank, and with customers. Your word processor should be able to output documents and read documents with the .doc extension. The extension is three or four characters with a "period" in front that tells the computer what kind of program to use to process your file or document.

WYSIWYG Editor - If you plan to have a website, you will either need to pay someone $2,000.00 or more to do it for you or you will have to do it yourself. If you are starting on a low budget, then you will probably want to do it yourself.

You should really have a WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. What a WYSIWYG editor does is take the information that you visually create on a web page and translate it into the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) computer code that make the web page show up in the Browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Two free applications you should download are Adobe Acrobat Reader at www.adobe.com and Macromedia Flash Player at www.macromedia.

If you follow these recommendations, you will have everything you need to get your Small Office Home Office set up and ready to go.

About the author:

Start your Internet Business/Home Business the right way and save $3000, $4000 or more. Get your FREE 6 part mini-course here: http://daily-results.com/start-a-home-business.html VISIT our site: http://www.daily-results.com