Short Course on Purchasing a Personal Computer

In this chapter, we address several questions regarding PCs.

• What to buy?

• Where to buy?

• What to do to avoid buying, i.e., upgrade alternatives.

What to Buy?

We are going to look at the kind of PC you should use in your business. The answer is a PC that costs about $1700.00. The following table lists the recommendation we gave in 1995, one for 1997 and a column that indicates the increase in capacity or change between the two recommendations:

In general, you can see that the price has gone up $300.00 over two years or an increase of approximately 10% per year, but the capacity to do work and store information has more than doubled. This equipment will meet all normal business applications and you should expect this to work with minimal changes for 2-3 years, i.e., about $500.00/year .

One option with PC’s is "Multimedia". What this means is that the PC has two pieces of additional equipment:

Games/entertainment:

All the new educational programs and games depend on high quality sound and visual graphics to make the programs interesting. This is not especially useful in an office environment, but great if you are running your business out of a home office.

Educational/Training programs:

Many of the finance and business programs being developed will come on a CD-ROM and have built-in training videos. TurboTax™ and Quicken™ are two such products that, when you press the F1 for help, display a window which contains a person explaining what the program is doing. This is a very cost-effective On Job Training (OJT) solution for business applications.

Where to Buy?

The next question is who you should purchase the equipment from, a retail outlet, i.e., Office Max, your local computer store, a catalog supplier, i.e., Dell (1-800-727-3355) or GATEWAY (1-800-846-3607). Here are some guidelines to take into consideration when making your choice:

Your equipment supplier is also your technical support. If you have a local company who:

• Answers the phone,

• Has been in business more than two years,

• Supports 1 and 3 year warrantees on equipment,

• Is within 20% of the best price you can find,

then they are a good first choice. They will help you get started and guide you through operating basics of the computer. Most important, when the computer stops, and you can No Longer Run Your Business, they will come fix it.

If you have used a computer in the past and are upgrading, then you can choose either a retail outlet or a catalog supplier. I have found that some of the catalog suppliers, i.e., Dell and Gateway, tend to have better phone support for problems and excellent quality, if you purchase their premium service, while the retail outlets tend to have more alternatives and slightly lower prices. If your retail outlet offers repair and equipment upgrade services in addition to sales, they tend to be a better place than the catalog supplier in that you can get walk-in repair and upgrades as time goes by. If not, then the catalog suppliers tend to be a better alternative.

What To Do To Avoid Buying, I.E., Upgrade Alternatives

Personal computers, (PCs) have been out now for almost 15 years and several models have come and gone. If you have a computer with a 386 or 486 processor, (Open the PC and the number will be on the big chip on the big green board) you can extend the working life of the machine with several of the products discussed below.

If you are considering an upgrade to a PC, a rule of thumb is if the cost required for the upgrade equals or exceeds 50% of a new replacement machine, it is better to buy than to upgrade. The reason behind this is that the new machines tend to be 3 to 5 times faster then the previous model. The one thing you can never have enough of in computers is SPEED!!!. Since your time is one thing you cannot get more of, it matters a great deal if you are paced by the speed of your PC. Later we will show how to calculate the effective cost of a slow computer.

There are several hardware and software enhancements you can add to your PC to extend its working life. Here are several recommendations that will give you significant improvement at nominal cost.

• Upgrade to Windows 95 ($90.00)

• Re-organize your disk with MS-DOS 6.22 ($10.00)

• Clean up your disk with CleanSweep95 ($30.00)

• Improve memory utilization with SoftRam ($30.00)

• Upgrade your processor ($200.00-$300.00)

Upgrade Windows to Windows 95 (approx. $90.00)

Windows comes in several versions. If you have a 486 or later processor, you should be running at least Windows 3.11. Newer machines, i.e., Pentiums, come with Windows 95 which is an improvement in that is has:

• Improved response time

• Eliminated insufficient resource errors

• A user-friendly interface

Below is a table briefly outlining some of the differences between each of the Windows versions. At a minimum, you should be at Windows 3.11.