Gung-Ho for SOHO Stuff? First Think About What You Need

I used to think that “SOHO” stood for South of Houston Street, a section of Manhattan known for its artists, writers and other bohemians. Today it stands for “small office/home office,” and it’s the fastest-growing segment of the computer market.

Because of the size of the market, there are lots of hardware companies, software vendors and online service providers scrambling to create or repackage products for people who work at home.

In many cases, there are no real differences between a product designed for the home office and those for any other type of business or personal use. Rather, your home office needs are determined by the type of business you’re in.

If you’re an architect who works at home, for example, you would probably use the same industrial-strength computer-aided design program that colleagues who commute to an office do.

A professional writer might need a full-feature word-processing program such as Word or WordPerfect, but someone who writes only a few letters a week and an occasional short report can get away with an integrated program such as Microsoft Works or ClarisWorks.

The type of computer you’ll need at home will also be pretty much the same as what you’d need at the office, with a couple of exceptions. First, office machines typically have network cards that would be superfluous in most home offices. Second, computers connected to a company’s local-area network might not need a modem, printer or CD-ROM drive, all of which are essential for the home office.

Hewlett-Packard Co., cognizant of this market, is now offering the Vectra 500 Series for small businesses. The machines come with Microsoft Office software (Word, Excel, Access Database and PowerPoint presentation system) pre-installed, which is great if you want these programs and don’t already have them. It also has a modem that not only sends and receives data and faxes, but also acts as a voicemail system and phone dialer.

The version I received from HP to test has a 166-megahertz Pentium CPU, 16 megabytes of memory, a 1.6-gigabyte hard drive and, of course, Windows 95. It was easy to set up--everything is pre-installed. The only thing I didn’t like is that the CD-ROM drive and floppy are near the bottom of the case, so if you put the machine under your desk, you have to bend down almost to the floor to get to them.

Acer’s Aspire Home Office Solution series of machines, which start at about $2,000, come with at least 16 megs of memory and up to 2 gigabytes of hard disk storage. A 28,800-bps (bits per second) fax modem with phone answering machine and voicemail capabilities is standard. Acer has done a phenomenal job of packaging these machines in attractive cases.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money for a PC that’s suitable for a home office. AST Computer, for example, has introduced a line of machines that Wal-Mart is selling for $997. The basic machine has a 66-MHz 486 CPU with 8 megabytes of RAM and 540 megabytes of hard disk space. A 486 is old technology, but it’s fast enough for general office applications. Later, you can add more memory and hard disk drive should the need arise. The machine has a 14-inch color monitor, stereo speakers, four-speed CD-ROM and a 14,400-bps modem. It comes with Windows 95, Microsoft Works and the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia.

The 14,400-bps modem is the only major weak point in the AST machine. I can live with a 486 CPU, but if you plan to surf the World Wide Web, you’ll want a 28,800-bps modem. Internal modems, which come with these machines, are cheaper than external modems and save desk space, but I prefer external modems because they’re easier to install and move--and if something goes wrong, you can turn them off and back on, which often resolves the problem. External modems also have status lights that you can use to diagnose a problem. Nevertheless, an internal modem will get the job done, and that’s what counts.

Just about any modem can be used to send and receive faxes, but this is a mixed blessing.

It’s great for sending computer-generated documents from the PC but not so great for receiving a fax. You send a document by “printing” it to the modem, and because it doesn’t have to be printed and scanned as with a regular fax, the receiver gets a higher-quality fax, plus you save paper. I don’t rely on a fax modem to receive faxes, however. Regular fax machines are cheap, reliable and use little electricity. Best of all, you can leave them on 24 hours a day. If you use a modem to receive a fax, the PC must be running, the fax software must be loaded, and when a fax does come in, it can interfere with whatever else your PC is doing. Then, if you want the document on paper, you have to print it out.

Electronic mail is quickly becoming as important as a fax machine in communicating with customers, and the World Wide Web is full of free information that will help you run your business. Home pages on the Web may soon be as important as company brochures.

Commercial online services such as CompuServe and America Online provide e-mail connections to the Internet. They often charge more than direct Internet-access providers, but they are generally easier to use.

Don’t be seduced by the bells and whistles on some modems and PCs aimed at the home office market. Most major PC vendors offer machines with voicemail, modem phone dialing and other features that most people never use. Many of the modems in home office PCs will answer your phone and take messages. It’s a sexy-sounding option that at first blush seems like the perfect prescription for a home office. But frankly, I find these systems to be more of a hassle than they’re worth. I prefer my inexpensive stand-alone AT&T; digital voicemail machine. It sits on my kitchen counter, uses almost no electricity, doubles as a speakerphone and works even when the PC is turned off.

Another mixed-blessing product for the home office is the integrated printer, scanner and copier. There are a number of these on the market, including the OfficeJet Series 300 from Hewlett-Packard and the Multipass C2500 from Canon. These machines start at about $550 and take up less space than a separate printer, fax and copier. But there are drawbacks. None of the components is as good as what you can get in a stand-alone product. The printer in the HP models, for example, operates at three pages per minute in black only; the Canon prints in color at speeds of up to five pages per minute. HP is one of several companies that makes superb inkjet printers that are faster and have optional color.

The copier and scanner functions are sheet-fed--you can’t scan or copy a book. The fax option is probably the most attractive. You get a plain-paper fax with all the major features of a stand-alone fax machine. But what bothers me most about the machine is that if one component breaks, all three are unavailable until it’s fixed.

Still, these integrated devices are a lot cheaper than buying everything separately. You’d be out about $1,500 if you bought a stand-alone fax machine (about $200), a personal copier ($400), an inkjet printer ($400) and a good flatbed scanner (about $500).

The most overlooked computer component essential to a home business is a backup system. Running a business from home is hard enough even when things go right. The last thing you need is to lose all your data and use of software. Of course, you can back up using floppy disks, but that can take forever. A tape backup system is much more efficient. The Ditto drive from Iomega is an excellent solution. The external versions plug into your PC’s parallel port and come with easy-to-use Windows software. The 800-megabyte version costs $149 and the 3,200-megabyte tape drive costs $299. Cartridges are about $30.

Lawrence J. Magid can be reached by e-mail at magid@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Staying Home

The number of people who do at least some of their work at home is expected to almost double by 2006. In millions:

Total home workers: 1990: 34.7

2006: 66.7

Part-time self-employment: 16.7

Bring work home: 19.7

Telecommuters: 11.4

Self-employed: 20.0

Source: Find/SVP

Note: 1996-2006 are projections