Bringing Home The Business - home office equipment and services

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Feb, 2000 by Kimberly Lankford

HOME | Cheap technology means a WELL-EQUIPPED OFFICE can now be within everyone's reach.

DAVE CLARK, president of Day-Timers appointment-book company, takes his laptop home once or twice a week to check e-mail and make international calls from about 10 P.M. to 1 A.M. in an office that doubles as a guest bedroom. And he can't be the only one. "I got seven e-mails between last night and this morning at 8," he says. "I don't know how you cannot have a home office because of the nature of work."

Eileen Keyes skips the hourlong commute to a Merrill Lynch office in New Jersey three days each week and works on her laptop in an extra bedroom in her Staten Island home. Peter van Aartrijk runs a public relations firm, with clients located throughout the country, from an office in his basement. "People today are a lot more open to these businesses," he says, adding that his clients understand that low overhead helps him keep his fees down.

Still, technology is advancing so quickly, it's easy to fall a few steps behind. Home-office workers--including CEOs, novelists, professional athletes, moms working while their kids sleep, telecommuters and microbusiness owners searching for their first clients--can offer great tips, but some are in the dark about the newest time- and money-saving equipment and services.

Some buy fax machines and extra phone lines when they could receive free faxes electronically. They idle in post-office queues when postage could be as close as their own PC printers. They dial up the Internet on phone lines to check their e-mail when they could have instant Web access. And many rely on answering machines that subject callers to busy signals or endless ringing when they're on another line.

But those snags can be easily avoided. Here's a guide to creating a slick, modern, low-cost home office.

Equipment

A COMPUTER IS the linchpin to setting up a home office, and it has always been a major investment. "I bought my first strong computer in 1989 for $5,000," says architect Neal Zimmerman, author of Home Office Design (John Wiley & Sons, $19.95). "You could almost buy a car for that much then."

You can now buy a powerful computer for $1,000. For example, Compaq's Presario 5834 is fast (with a 500-mega-hertz Celeron processor), has a fat memory (64 megabytes of RAM and a 17-gigabyte hard drive) and comes with quick access to the Internet built in (56K modem). Even the fastest desktops generally cost less than $3,000, plus about $200 to $400 for a monitor. Some companies offer package deals: The NEC Z1, at $2,400, comes with a cool, 15-inch flat LCD monitor (it has a Pentium III 450MHz processor, 96MB RAM, 8.4GB hard drive and 56K modem).

If you want portability, you can buy a top-of-the-line laptop for about $3,500. Dell's Inspiron, which costs $3,550, is more powerful than most desktops (it has a Pentium III 500MHz processor, 15.4-inch screen, 128MB RAM, 12GB hard drive, 56K modem and removable CD-ROM and floppy drives).

For less than $2,000 you can get a slower version that's still fast enough for most home offices. The Sony VAIO PCG-F250, for example, weighs about 7 pounds (it has a 366MHz Celeron processor, 32MB RAM, 4.3GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive and 56K modem) and costs $1,400.

Tech support. If you buy a new computer, keep your old one. Keep upgrading the software and back up frequently so you can use the retired machine in a pinch if your main computer dies.

Zimmerman, who converted his attic into a home office, has three generations of computers networked so he can hop from one to another if there's a breakdown. It also gives him three workstations for different tasks: He uses his newest computer for computer-assisted design, e-mail and Web access, an older computer for bookkeeping and writing, and a laptop at his administrative station, where he makes phone calls, answers mail and keeps his time sheet.

If you network home computers, check out Intel's AnyPoint home-net-working device ($89). It allows you to link computers by plugging an adapter between a computer port and phone line for each computer. The computers are linked over your phone line on a different frequency than the one at which phone calls travel, so you can still use the phone for a regular call or to connect to the Internet.

But redundancy is just a temporary solution: Eventually you'll have to get a crashed computer fixed. When your computer's warranty expires, you may be left to wade through the FAQs on the company's Web site (if you can get online) or pay by the minute to talk to the company's 24-hour tech support. Compare the cost of that tech support with what you can get from other sources. For example, the PC Crisis Line (800-828-4358) charges $3 a minute for the first ten minutes, then $1 a minute if your computer can be fixed over the phone. Intel's Answer-Express (888-795-7357) charges $49.95 for three months, or $99.95 a year for unlimited support.

Printer. A home-use black-and-white laser printer usually costs $400 to $700. For example, Hewlett-Packard's 1100se, which prints 600 x 600 dots per inch and up to eight pages per minute, is at the low end of the price range. HP's 2100se, which prints 1200 x 1200 dpi and ten pages per minute, is at the high end. Color inkjet printers, which tend to be slower, generally cost between $100 and $400. (HP's DeskJet 812c, for example, costs $150, has 600 x 600 dpi resolution, and prints up to six and a half pages per minute, or ppm, in black and white and four and a half ppm in color.)