50 steals and splurges - Cover Story - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, March, 1997 by Nicola B. Godfrey

3 Spend the money for the high-speed Internet access of an ISDN line, especially if you're spending hours online doing business transactions, maintaining your Web site, or gathering info. An ISDN card is cheap-- Cardinal Technologies's IDC 100i is $199 (717-293-3000, www.cardtech. com). But with one time installation charges of $100 to $200, fees from your local phone company varying from $24 to $184 a month depending on the rate plan, plus local call connect-time charges, ISDN service is still a splurge.

4 Put your bucks where your backup is. For safe, offsite data backup, storage, and easy retrieval over phone lines (store files in New York, retrieve them while on a business trip in California), subscribe to Surefind (412-514-1000, 800-787-0009, www. surefind.com; first month free, thereafter fees of $9.95 to $54.95 for one to five backups a week).

5 Attend at least one industry-related convention or exposition each year in an exotic locale and stay on for a vacation. The expo will keep you upto-date in your field, and expenses accrued on the business portion of your trip are tax deductible. Visit EXPO guide (www.expoguide.com) or Trade Show News Network (www. TSNN.com).

6 Commit your hard-earned money to the best virus scanning program you can buy, such as Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2.0 for Windows 95 (Symantec, 541-334-6054, 800-441-7234, www.symantec. com; $79 list) or Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit 7.59 for Windows and Windows 95, shown (Dr. Solomon's, 617-273-7400, 800-310-9078, www. drsolomon.com; $99.95 list).

7 Invest in trade books, journals, and magazines. The Web is great for spot research, but having ready-references on hand is still the best way to explore the depths of your specialty. Subscribe to industry reference sources that offer annual updates and addendums for a membership fee.

8 Splurge on a yellow pages ad-- it's worth the expense if people let their fingers do the walking to find businesses in your field. Call your local yellow pages publisher for rates.

9 Don't do everything yourself-- hire a lawyer to avoid worrying over unforeseen legal or tax woes. Pay an accountant to help set up your bookkeeping system before you take over using such accounting and tax software as TurboTax for Business (Intuit; Win 95, Win; $69.95 list) or MacinTax (Intuit; Mac; $34.95 list).

10 Buy big, deep, sturdy, five-tier lateral file cabinets. Despite the pursuit of the paperless office, you are still required to keep paper records for long periods of time and you'll need easy access to them. Check out Steelcase's 800 and 900 models (800-333-9939, www. steelcase.com; $470 to $880 list).

11 If you want a high-end Web site with transaction capabilities and multiple links to other sites, hire a Web page designer. For a basic home page, try doing it yourself with Microsoft FrontPage 1.1 (Microsoft, 206-882-8080, 800-426-9400, www.microsoft. com; Win 95, NT; $149 list) or Adobe PageMill 2.0 (800-833-6687, www. adobe.com; Mac; $149 list/$99 street). Otherwise, first put your best page forward with the help of a pro.