How to Buy a Business Desktop Computer

When shopping for a desktop computer for your small or medium-size company, resist the temptation to buy cheap. Instead, invest in a desktop that will help your office run smoothly for years to come. 

Author of this post Shaan Ali choudhry
Business PCs may not be the sexiest players in the PC market, but where the actual number of units the big PC makers ship each year is concerned, they do represent a significant segment. Think about it: You can still write a novel on a typewriter, shoot photographs with film, or play music live and record it with a DAT deck, but very few businesses can get their work done without a PC. Even a mom-and-pop shop that caters to a non-technological audience (say, a buggy whip maker) needs a PC to communicate with suppliers, customers, and potential customers. E-mail, Twitter, the Web: All of these technologies make today's business happen.
While it may be tempting to buy a simple consumer PC from a big-box store like Best Buy or Wal-Mart, you'll probably be doing yourself and your customers a disservice if you do. Specialized business PCs have extra features that make them better suited to the office than the $350 sales-circular special. For one, business desktops are built to last longer, and are usually easier to service, than consumer PCs. After all, the longer a business PC is down, the more money it costs you in lost earning time. Business PC makers may have specialized tech-support lines to help you troubleshoot your QuickBooks problem. At the very least, you can add a service contract to your business PC so that on-site tech-support calls are handled by techs who respond in hours or minutes rather than in days or weeks, like the ones who handle consumer tech support.
The Heart of the Matter: How Much Power?
Dual-core processors, particularly AMD Athlon II X2 or Intel Core i3 models, are the norm in business PCs, though lower powered netbook/nettop-class processors such as the AMD e-350 or Intel Atom can still show up in really cheap models. Pentium Dual Core processors are now the lower-priced desktop processors, and use technology from older Intel Core 2 Duo processors. For example, the Pentium Dual Core E5000 series processors are similar to the ones in the Core 2 Duo E7000 series. I recommend at least a dual-core processor, whether AMD or Intel, because it's a must for today's attention-challenged, multitasking PC users. Quad-core is an option for the users like graphic artists, hard-core number crunchers, and other gearheads who stress over the speed of their PCs, but dual-core should be enough for non-technical and non-graphics-based users.
Look for at least4 gigabytes of RAM, and the more memory the better. More memory allows you to do two things: open up more programs and windows at once and perform multimedia processes (like editing photos) faster. It you're the type who keeps 15 tabs open in Firefox or Internet Explorer, you'll need to have more than 1GB of memory. Windows is a resource hog, particularly with the integrated graphics commonly found in business PCs, so 2GB is a minimum (and is recommended even if you're still running Windows XP).
Storage: It's Okay to Go Light
Business PCs require less storage than consumer PCs, since you're less likely to sync your iPod or download lots of video to your work PC. Since storage is so inexpensive these days, a storage capacity of 250 to 500GB is a good balance between economy and space. Frankly, 40GB of available storage should be enough for just about all the PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents you use on a day-to-day basis. Anything beyond that should be stored on an external hard drive or server.
Optical drives are less critical for consumer PCs these days, what with being able to stream multimedia content from the Internet or downloading content directly to hard drives. But a DVD burner is still a must for a small business PC. You may need it to burn copies of projects for your clients, and you'll still need to read the occasional CD or DVD sent to you by a supplier or customer. Look for a full-size optical drive with a tray that opens—it will help for the occasional business-card-size CD that comes your way. (Mini CDs, survivors of a fad dating to the early 2000s, tend to get stuck in a slot-loading drive because of their odd size, and if that happens you have to open up the drive to extract them.) High-speed Internet basically replaced the need to ship large files on optical discs, so Blu-ray is only necessary if you work for a movie company.
High-Powered Graphics Not Necessary
Most business PCs come with integrated graphics, whether from Intel, AMD/ATI, or Nvidia. Integrated graphics are fine for a business PC, since you won't be playing 3D games on the system. (Installing games is the easiest way to make a system unstable, and you don't want your money-earning system to go down unnecessarily.) Tower PCs and most small-form-factor (SFF) PCs will have PCIe x16 card slots for discrete graphics cards, in case you need one. Most businesspeople who require discrete graphics will use them for specialized tasks like GPU acceleration in Photoshop CS6 or 3D graphics visualization for architectural drawings. Ultra-small or ultra-slim form factors will likely have only integrated graphics and no card slots. These systems are best suited to general PC tasks (the majority of business tasks).