Calling all home office shoppers

Home Office Computing, July, 1998 by Douglas Gantenbein

Let's run a little memory check--nothing too ancient; we'll just go back five years. Bill Clinton was president, the Rolling Stones were on tour, and Bill Gates was a billionaire. Seems like hardly anything has changed.

Unless, that is, you wanted equipment for your home office. Venture over to the local computer superstore or Web site and you'll see that plenty has changed--for the better. An example: Back then, Dell's speedy flagship 486-66 466DE/2 desktop came with a whopping 230MB hard disk, a 15-inch monitor, and dual floppies. No CD, no sound, no modem. Price$4,000. Want a modem? No problem. U.S. Robotics's highly regarded Sportster internal gave you a not-so-blazing 14.4Kbps (true, there was no Web, so who cared?) for a modest $339. For sound, you could get a Sound Blaster 16 ASP card for $350. CD-ROM drive? You bet--double-speed Toshiba internal, $425. And any one in the market for a color printer could grab a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 500 for $500.

It's no surprise that prices for home office technology have dropped since 1993. That's been the story ever since IBM unveiled its first PC. What's striking about the past year is that the downward trend has accelerated. Dollars that would've purchased only a "bargain" device of middling quality a few years back now buy you a product that surpasses your expectations.

Whether you're a telecommuting insurance adjuster who needs a high-speed modem or a freelance commercial artist looking for a high-resolution 21-inch monitor, you'll find great deals as manufacturers slash prices to compete for home-based workers' business. To see just how far a home office dollar goes today, we look at four price categories--$99, $249, $499, and $999--and pick a variety of values that'll improve your productivity and professional image

$99

* Speedy 56Kbps modems debuted less than a year ago at around $200, yet already are selling for half that price. Diamond Multimedia's SupraExpress 56 internal modem (www.diamondmm.com), for example, not only supports the new V.90 standard but uses Diamond's "shotgun" technology to team with another modem for downloads approaching 112Kbps if you have two analog phone lines. At a street price of $92, you'll be surfing at near-ISDN speed without the expense of setting up a digital line.

* Scanners used to be big-ticket items. But now you can purchase the AcerScan Prisa 310P (www.acer.com) for $99--including image-editing software and Xerox's TextBridge OCR. The parallel-interface Prisa scans full legal-size documents; the faster SCSI version is yours for just $20 more.

* One of the best bargains you'll find in software is iPublisb 2.0 (www.design-intelligence.com) from Design Intelligence, a graphic design and page-layout program that's equally suited for desktop publishing, presentations, and Web applications. Novices can click on a template and bang out a document in a matter of minutes, while more experienced users will put the free images and fonts to use. Either way, iPublish makes you look like a million bucks for only $99.

* Time was when a crummy 1.2MB floppy drive cost $100. Now you can purchase a 100MB Iomega Zip drive (www.iomega.com) from Gateway and Dell for $99, with retail prices soon to follow suit. That's a buck a megabyte for storage you can put in your pocket, with space to store nearly any graphics file imaginable.

* We're all losing memory as we get older; fortunately, it's cheaper than ever to buy some back. Would you believe $99 or less for a 32MB SIMM, available all over the Web and at most superstores? Those who remember agonizing over adding 2MB to go with the 1MB that came with your 386SX-based machine are free to shake your heads.

* Sure, CD-RW and DVD are all the rage, but that means those who settle for old-fashioned CD-ROM technology get some fantastic buys. Memorex's latest 32x Internal CD-ROM drive (www.memorex.com) sells for $99 and will allow you to read CD-recordables, CD-rewritables, and most audio CDs. Yank that quad-speed drive out of your system and prepare yourself for some serious acceleration.

* Voice-mail offerings by telephone companies have muscled into the answering machine market, but owning your own unit fixes your costs and gives you portability. AT&T's 1725 digital answering machine (www.att.com) offers 24 minutes of incoming message capacity and three different outgoing messages to relay to callers when you're away from home. The price: $89.

* As PC prices plummet, networks are within the reach of nearly every virtual worker, Hubs cost more than $100 per port only a few years ago, but now Linksys's EtherFast line of high-speed 100Base-TX hubs (www.linksys.com) includes a five-port model that goes for $99. It comes with LED indicators that help with troubleshooting and show hub activity. Even better, the installation doesn't amount to more than running your cables and plugging them in.

* Interestingly, "free" cell phones that come with a year's worth of cellular service are becoming a thing of the past. But $99 gets you a heckuva buy. AT&T (www.att.com), for instance, offers a digital Ericsson DH318 at that price, which combines paging and voice-mail functions with the phone. For another $50 a month, you can get a calling plan that gives you 400 minutes of airtime, and there's no obligation to sign a long-term contract.