Rethinking the ‘Must-Haves’ for Today’s Efficient Home Office

Every year or two I like to rethink what you might need or want in a small or home office. Some products that seemed necessary a few years ago don’t now. But progress has brought us new “must-haves.”

Of course you’ll need a PC or a Mac, but if you already have one, you might not need an upgrade. There used to be compelling reasons to upgrade every two or three years, but that’s less true now. If you have a reasonably new Mac or any PC with a Pentium III or Celeron chip, you’re probably just fine.

Your old machine might be anemic when it comes to memory. These days I recommend 128 megabytes of memory, with 64 MB as a minimum.

If you’re shopping for a machine for business, you might be encouraged to get Microsoft Windows 2000 instead of Windows 98 or Windows Me, which are marketed for home use. Although Windows 2000 is more robust and reliable than Windows 98 or Me, it really isn’t necessary for running business applications that also can run on the consumer versions of Windows. I like Windows 2000, but I also like Windows 98 Second Edition. If you buy a home PC today, it probably will come with Windows Me, which also is OK.

Disk storage keeps getting cheaper, a good thing because files--especially those with photos, videos or audio--keep getting larger. I recommend a minimum of 20 gigabytes, but you’ll find that 40 GB isn’t much more expensive. If you have an older machine, you can add memory and a second hard drive. Memory is now very cheap. An extra 64 MB of memory can cost you as little as $20. Egghead.com has 128-MB memory upgrade cards starting at $29.99. Check with your PC manufacturer to make sure you get memory that meets your machine’s specifications. Kingston Technology’s Web site (https://www.kingston.com) helps you find memory based on your machine’s model number. For about $150 plus labor, you can add a fast 40-GB hard drive.

I’ve always recommended a backup system. In the past, I suggested either a tape backup or a Zip drive. But they are no longer needed because you can now back up to CD-ROMs. Many of today’s PCs and the newest crop of Macs are equipped with CD-rewritable, or CD-RW, drives. If you don’t have one, you can add an external drive that plugs into a Universal Serial Bus port for about $200. CD-R discs, to which you write only once, are cheaper than the rewritable CD-RW discs, and the fact that they can’t be updated or erased actually makes them better for backup.

In the old days, I recommended a modem on every machine, but today that’s not necessary if you have a broadband connection such as digital subscriber line or a cable modem and a local area network, or LAN, to connect you to the Internet. For today’s business machines, I recommend that you get an ethernet card. They are cheap (less than $30 for a desktop machine) and make it easy to connect to a DSL or cable line or a local area network. Some PCs and most Macs now come equipped with ethernet adapters.

Although some offices are out of range of both cable and DSL, the services are becoming widely available and are priced competitively, starting at less than $40 a month. You’ll find information about various service options at https://www.larrys world.com/broadband.htm.

A LAN is extremely handy if you have more than one machine in your office. LANs enable you to exchange files between machines and share resources such as printers and Internet connections.

Basic (wired) LANs are quite inexpensive. In addition to an ethernet card in each machine, you’ll need one hub to connect all your machines. That will cost you as little as $25 for a four-port hub (four machines) or $69 for an eight-port hub. Look for a 10/100 hub that allows you to connect at either 10 or 100 megabits per second. Ten Mbps is fast enough for office applications. You’ll also need to run ethernet cables between each machine and the hub.

The main hassle with setting up a network is running the ethernet cables to each machine. You can avoid that with a wireless LAN, but that is more expensive. I just added a notebook PC to my home office network using a SohoWare Cablefree NetBlaster II wireless network. Installation was easy compared with setting up a wired network. Whether it’s cost effective depends on what it’s worth to avoid the cost and hassle of stringing wires. The wireless hub costs $249, plus $149 for each desktop PC interface card or $199 for each notebook PC card. If you get a wireless network, make sure it’s 802.11b or “WiFi” compliant, which means that it will operate at 11 Mbps and be compatible with equipment from other vendors. Wireless is especially handy if you want to access the Internet from a conference room, a lunch area or an outside patio.

Of course, you need a printer. A laser printer is good if you do a lot of printing because, even though it costs more to buy, it’s cheaper to use. Not counting paper, you’ll pay between 1 and 2 cents a copy for laser printing compared with 3 to 5 cents a copy for inkjet. Lexmark’s laser printers, such as its Optra E312L, start at about $299 for one that can print as many as 10 pages a minute.

A good inkjet printer, however, enables you to print in both black and color, and you can now get inkjet printers that are as fast and almost as crisp as laser printers. Expect to pay between $100 and $250 for a good home office-grade color printer such as the $199 Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 952c, which prints black-and-white pages at up to 11 pages a minute. Lexmark’s Z52 Color Jetprinter, which sells for only $139, is rated at an impressive 15 pages a minute in black and seven pages a minute in color, though actual speeds vary.

I used to recommend a scanner, but I hardly ever use mine. Most of the information I would have scanned in the past now can be downloaded over the Internet. If you do need an occasional scan, you can get it from Kinko’s or other copy shops.

In the past, I recommended against multi-function devices, but now I’m convinced that you can get close to “best of breed” for each component. Such machines usually include a printer, scanner, copier and, in some cases, fax in one device priced as low as $200 for the Lexmark Z82 (no fax) and as high as about $800 for the HP OfficeJet G85, which is faster and has fax capabilities. Multi-function devices save money and desk space and often are easier to set up because you have to deal with only one machine and one installation CD.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 2:10 p.m. weekdays on the KNX (1070) Technology Hour. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.