Choosing Workstation Hardware

The advancements in processor design have led to a situation where leading-edge PC technology offers  far more power than is actually needed for typical office tasks. Reliability has also advanced to the point where most computer troubles are software-oriented. System hardware failure is rare.

As with all technology, price rises in an exponential manner as the "cutting edge" is approached. Thus it makes better economic sense to buy equipment just short of the leading edge. A machine with anything in excess of 2GHz processor-speed will meet all but the most stringent requirements, and should be a more economic purchase than the very fastest model available.

Because stores sell machines "by specification rather than performance" they will often urge you to buy the very fastest processor, even if that means only 10% more speed and 50% more cost.  At the same time, because peripherals like monitors, keyboards and printers don't "push the figures upward"  you may find that paying for a top-spec processor doesn't necessarily guarantee quality peripherals being supplied along with it.

It's also important to realise that most new machines are now supplied with Windows Vista, and in many instances you have no choice over this. Yet, Vista has many compatibility-issues that render it largely unsuitable for general office use. 

A few guidelines to choosing equipment:

Displays - in may ways the most important piece of kit.

Look for a quality display. Image quality matters. A slightly higher spend here will reap huge benefits in terms of user-satisfaction. All too often large amounts of cash are spent on an over-specified system box, coupled with a mediocre display. The display is in many ways more important, and a quality model will probably last through one or more system-box upgrades, so a good display is a wise investment, whereas an expensive processor will be worth beer-money two years from now.  

Many upgraders will be buying LCD for the first time, and there are one or two points to note about this technology. While most people agree that LCDs (flat panels) are now superior in most respects to the older CRT technology, there are one or two pitfalls. 

Perhaps the most important concern with flat panels  - one often overlooked is that you cannot just choose the display resolution you like.  The LCD panel has only one working resolution*, whereas the older CRT technology can be set to whatever resolution (in terms of pixels per screen dimension) that you prefer.  Typical LCDs will be as follows:  

15"  - 1024x768
17" - 1280x1024
19" - 1280x1024
19" Widescreen- 1440x960
20" - 1440x1280

Point to note here is that the 17" model crams the same number of pixels as the 19" into a much smaller area, giving rise to very small text. Unless your eyes are up-to working with tiny text all day long, I'd therefore advise you to avoid seventeen-inch flat panels.   Go for a 19" as the basic model - or larger if you can afford it.

Widescreen or standard?  Your call on this one, it's mainly a matter of preference.  Widescreen is probably the way to go if you view a lot of media files, which will often tend to be in 'letterbox' format these days. For general work I prefer the standard aspect-ratio, but opinions on this differ.  Main point to note is that while a widescreen display has greater length, it has less height  than the equivalent standard panel. 

Upgrades: If you're thinking of replacing that old CRT, but the computer still has some life in it, then Most Pentium-3 or later computers will accept a flat panel,  although in this case you may be safer going for a standard (non-widescreen model)  as older display-cards may not have an option for the widescreen resolutions such as 1440x960. The majority of modern flat panels use exactly the same 15-pin 'VGA' connector as CRTs, so there are no connection problems. There are no specific software requirements, if a computer itself will take a flat panel, it should work with anything from Windows 95 upwards. 

*Setting the LCD to a resolution other than the intended one does in fact work, but results in a very "jaggy" display.

Displays that talk: Quite a few flat-panels are sold in 'Multimedia models'- which basically means they provide sound as well as vision. In truth, the speakers on these units are so tiny that they sound more like a telephone than a hifi. Thus, while inbuilt speakers might in some cases be useful, I wouldn't pay a premium for this feature, considering that a tenner spent on a budget pair of speakers will probably get you a better sound.

AMD Athlon, or Intel Pentium?  At the moment the price/performance balance is in favour of the AMD product-line.

Sourcing Computers.

In general it's more economic to buy prebuilt than to build to-order, though the later may be an option for top-end workstations. The choice of manufacturer hinges on two important aspects, one being  that it would be preferable  that the computer uses standard off-the-shelf parts rather than specialist parts which would make the unit hard to upgrade or repair.  This is one reason we tend to steer clear of Dell or IBM desktops.  HP and Acer machines tend to be more standardised.

A second, and more major concern is that of preinstalled trial software. Many new machines no longer come with  a 'clean copy' of Windows, instead the operating-system had been heavily-modified by the addition of advertising for ISP promotions, AOL browsers, Trial copies of antivirus products, and so on. This junk interferes with the use of the machine as a standard desktop, and its removal is virtually impossible save by a format-and-reinstall.  As of writing, HP and Acer machines are not excessively affected by this. Other brands, for example Toshiba, Sony or NEC presently suffer from very heavily from 'junkware' - and we would thus suggest avoiding these makes -Or, to accept the fact that there is a 'hidden cost of ownership' of these brands, in that the computer will likely need reformatting and reinstalling straight out of the box, and this might add, say, and additional 20-25% tothe actual cost of acquiring it in a useable condition.  

Keyboards and mice are very inexpensive, so again spend a bit more on quality models, and the benefits will far outweigh the small extra cost. Optical mice are worth the extra cost, being far less prone to sticking and jamming than the ball-operated kind.  Microsoft keyboards and mice are a good choice. Logitech hardware is also good, but beware of advertising foistware on any associated disks. A point to watch is that some keyboards have a 'displaced' set of cursor keys,  often to allow power-control or other pointless extra-feature keys above them. Avoid, as they will necessitate that you change your whole typing style to accommodate the misplaced keys.  

Sound- Often not required on office PCs, however the motherboards we use are equipped with a good-quality onboard sound-chip, so the facility is there if needed.  Bundled speakers and microphones supplied with PC-deals are often of very low quality, hence we tend to use somewhat better-quality units where these are requested. 

Memory is currently very cheap, so specify 512MB for general duties, or  more for demanding tasks. The main effect of having insufficient memory is that of slowness and excessive disk-activity each time an action is chosen.  Contrary to folklore, having only a small amount of memory will not cause your computer to 'crash,' however it will impact on the apparent speed at which it works, and the satisfaction you derive from it. There is actually a penalty in having too much RAM, in that hibernation will take much longer and use more disk space. Mainly  a concern for laptops with over 1GB RAM. 

Hard-disk capacity these days far exceeds most users' needs. With the exception of laptops, a networked machine shouldn't in any case be storing data locally - The data should be on the server. For a standard networked PC anything above 10GB  is acceptable. A possible exception is if video-editing or document management (bulk scanning) is envisaged, in which case more disk capacity may be needed.

Operating System: Windows XP is probably the best choice for most purposes. Windows Vista is now being supplied on a large proportion of new computers, and basically I can tell you, without mincing words,  that if you go this route you are (a) gaining absolutely nothing useful over XP, and (b) heading for a pile of trouble.  This raises an awkward question: What to do if your chosen model  has no option except for Vista?  The issue here is that XP requires activation with Microsoft, and at present Microsoft are offering no downgrade route from Vista to XP. Strictly speaking, you should buy retail XP and install it, but this will involve considerable extra cost, and of course most people would object on moral grounds to paying for what is essentially the same product twice over.. The other option is to use Windows 2000, which requires no activation, and in functionality terms is very nearly equivalent to XP Pro. This situation is a highly unsatisfactory one, and suppliers' insistence in 'pushing' Vista  is undoubtedly losing them sales, as buyers look for XP, or else decide to delay their upgrades.  

A further gripe with Vista is its larger number of variants. With XP, your choice was simple, Home or Pro. (or occasionally Media Center Edition)  With Vista, the number of options confuses buyers who don't understand the differences. Although upgrading is theoretically possible, the costs are swingeing, thus getting it wrong first-time is costly. A side-effect  is that when buying a prebuilt machine,  your choice of model will be much more limited  than with XP, since out of ten computers on the store shelf, probably only two of those will have the Vista version you need, whereas perhaps five would have had your preferred XP version.  This is not a good situation, either for the store in terms of lost sales, or for the buyer, who is forced to reject many otherwise-suitable computers on the basis of wrong Vista version.  And that's all assuming you actually want Vista, of course

Do I need XP Pro ?  (or Vista Business/Ultimate)  - Many business users just assume yes, and pay the extra regardless.  The lowdown is that Home editions cannot join an Active Directory Domain.  Thus, if your office network employs the Active Directory type of infrastructure, then you do need Pro. Otherwise you probably don't, and can thus save perhaps £30-50 per computer.  In fact, XP Home computers can participate in a network with a the addition of small utility, MyLogon. Although this does not provide all of the remote-management options of the Active Directory, in a small-business environment it will most likely be more than sufficient, and has the advantage of being much less complex  to setup and maintain than an Active Directory site. 

Or, you could look at Macs, or Linux. Both are very good computing platforms, the issues are mainly those of compatibility with software designed to run on Windows. If your firm mainly needs to produce standard office documents then Linux or Mac are a viable option,  if you need to run specific or purpose-written Windows software, then they probably aren't. (and in this case Vista may not be a good choice either as it stands a good chance of being incompatible with purpose-written software which was not specifically designed for it.)


Things to avoid:

Avoid subminiature units. These look attractive at first sight. Apart from being nonstandard, and therefore difficult to upgrade, they often suffer from overheating and consequent reliability problems.

Bundled software: Bear in mind that this will often be preinstalled. It might clash with the office-software you normally use, and it might not uninstall properly! In general, avoid bundled software. Unless it is the actual software package that you intend to use on the machine, it could cause you far more grief than benefit. Unfortunately this has become a major detraction of "big-name" systems recently. Many of these now come with a whole raft of preinstalled software (well, in truth the term software hardly does it justice, advertising-junk would be a more appropriate term.) For example, Dell hardware is good, however on recent batches of Dell machines we have found that Windows is preloaded with what amounts to a sheaf of advertising for various other companies. Removing this advertising "payload" would take literally hours of work, and might even prove to be impossible to do properly, so our policy on these is to wipe the disk and reinstall Windows.  The need to do this remedial-work of removing advertising "payloads" from new systems of course adds to the real cost of the new machine, and should be taken into account.