Processor
As mentioned in the overview, any processor speed will be adequate. If you are looking for performance, Pentium 4 is better than Pentium III, which is better than Celeron for any given clock speed and bus/RAM configuration. G4 Macs are faster than G3 Macs in a similar way. It is important to realise that the motherboard, bus, RAM, hard drive etc. all work together to determine the performance of a given system. A well balanced system may outperform an unbalanced system with a higher clock speed.
Use reviews in magazines to help your decision process, talk to other people who have bought machines recently, and try the machines yourself in shops to determine their responsiveness. There are readily accessible web sites dedicated to analysing different types of hardware.
As of the time of writing this, February 2002, a minimum of 128MB of RAM is recommended for worstation computers. Computers used as a file or print server as well should have 256MB RAM minimum. Within reason, the more the merrier.
Professional office work is heavily reliant on large volumes of data, which is usually stored on hard drives, so a fast hard drive can often make significant improvements to the speed of a given system.
Most hard drives sold today will be more than adequate for your needs. File servers or machines that you really want performing at high speeds may use RAID arrays or SCSI bus connections, which are very effective but relatively costly. Drives with high rotational speeds (7200 or 10,000+ RPM) can operate significantly faster than the standard 5400RPM drives, but generally these won't be necessary for offices with less than 10 computers.
Often forgotten, a vital component of any professional system.
Options include Floppy disc, Writeable CD/DVD, Zip Drive, Jaz Drive, Orb Drive, Tape Drive and others. Depending on the size of your practice, any of these except the floppy drive may be appropriate.
Tape drive is probably the best long term option due to the low cost per megabyte of backup tape. Although writeable CD's are often touted as a great backup system, the limited size of 700MB per disk make them a problem for doing whole system backups of multiple gigabytes.
Unattended backups using relatively small media (Zip, CD) can be a pain if the media fills up when nobody is around to put in a new one. This is less of a problem with, for example, tapes which can hold 10 - several hundred Gigabytes.
Manual backup systems are not advisable - semi-automatic or even fully automatic backup systems are much less likely to fail than systems that rely on humans!
It would be almost impossible to buy a system without a CD-ROM nowadays. A DVD-ROM would only be necessary if you wanted to play DVD Movies on the computer, as not a lot of software requires a DVD drive yet.
Be aware that there are many different types available. Ergonomic keyboards can be helpful to typists, sealed keyboards for use in vet clinics or wet areas, keyboards with card readers can save time entering Medicare or credit card details.
Again, many types available. The newer optical mice have few moving parts - again good in harsh environments. The scroll wheel is a very useful addition to the mouse, but not used by all software packages.
Unless you are playing CD's, DVD's or doing digital sound recording or dictation/voice recognition, this is entirely optional for an office machine, and NOT BUYING ONE can save money when buying the computer, and again later by discouraging people from using the computer for games etc.
Although high performance machines often come with high performance 3D graphic cards, these are often optimised for 3D gaming type work. A 2D optimised card is often cheaper and will improve performance of office software much more than 3D acceleration. Most 3D accelerators have fairly good 2D acceleration, but not all. Generally speaking, office software is more into data crunching than pretty pictures, so the graphic card is not as important.
It is important that the graphic card can support the resolution, color depth and monitor you want to use.
ALL office machines should have a Ethernet network interface card (NIC).
Even if you have only one machine, the Ethernet card may be used for fast internet connections, support work and the inevitable future expansion. The card will pay for itself when you next upgrade your hardware, allowing rapid transfer of documents from the old to the new computer.
These are often built onto the motherboard of a new machine. Most are 10/100 speed, the two most common speeds of twisted pair Ethernet (Measured in MHz - divide by 10 to get a rough idea of the Megabyte/s maximum speed).
If you cut corners on the price of your network card, you MAY find that if you have a larger network in the future, the card may let you down & cause more network errors than more expensive cards.
It is hard to find a computer without one of these! Most offices really only need at least one computer with a modem.
External modems have the advantage of being able to be turned off or reset without having to turn off or reset the computer they are attached to. They also have status lights that are readily visible and useful when troubleshooting network connection problems. There is nothing quite as sure as turning off the modem to guarantee your network is isolated from the rest of the world!
Internal modems take up less space and do not need external power.
Keep away from internal software based modems, often called "soft-modems" or "WINMODEMs". These use the computer's processor to do some of the hard work of interpreting the sound signals from your phone line, and are often not as reliable, quite apart from slowing your computer.
DON'T CUT CORNERS HERE!
Your staff will spend most of their working day looking at the monitor, so buy a good one! They often outlast the computer, and you will never regret spending more on a monitor.
Consider the resolution you need (1024x768 at least) and the size of the monitor (17" minimum). Too many dots in too small an area makes it hard to see/read text etc!
Consider an LCD screen - much smaller space usage on your desk, much cooler, less radiation, no dimming with age, no colouration with age, extremely clear display at its native resolution. Digital connection to an LCD display usually results in a much clearer image than analogue.
DON'T CUT CORNERS HERE EITHER!
Your office lives and dies with its paperwork. Even if you are totally electronic internally, your interface to the rest of the world is unfortunately still paper-based in most cases.
Do not buy ink-jets for your main office work - the volume will wear out the mechanism, and the cost of ink is significantly higher than toner.
Do not buy cheap upright laser printers designed for home office use. They have inferior paper feed mechanics, and do not allow multiple paper paths. Their toner is often more expensive than units designed for office work. They are designed for a much lighter workload than the average professional office generates.
Buy "flat-bed" laser printers with at least one cassette capable of taking 250-500 sheets of 80gsm A4 paper, and at least one multi-purpose feeder for letterhead stock, pre-printed forms, labels etc. Examples include the HP 2xxx or 4xxx series, or the Brother 1270.
In larger offices it may be useful to buy a printer with more paper trays to avoid the need for staff to hand-load special paper types. This is especially relevant if the office is physically large.
Consider having a second printer of the same type as a back-up - think of what would happen to your office if the printer breaks down. Because they have so many moving parts at extremes of temperature, break downs are more likely than with computers/monitors.
Although the most commonly omitted component of any system purchase, an uninterruptible power supply (hence UPS) can prevent crashes, data loss and damage to your expensive equipment. We consider these an ESSENTIAL, rather than optional, component.
If the cost is prohibitive, consider buying at least one for your server.
Looking at all our sites, the ones that run for months/years without problem always have UPS's installed!
Practice Pro runs on Mac OS 7.x thru 10.x, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, Millenium, NT, 2000, XP
Considered compulsory for each machine in your practice. Most good quality computers will come with anti-virus software pre-installed. Ensure the virus description files are kept up-to-date. Larger sites can store the virus definitions centrally for automated updating of networked machines.
Compulsory for all networks with continuous internet access. Highly recommended even for sites that use intermittant telephone dial-ups. Our firewall software usually detects a "hit" from a potential hacker within about 5 minutes of connecting to the internet.
Although Practice Pro will cover most of your office administration needs, most offices will need an accounting package, a general purpose word processor and often a spreadsheet, drawing package and presentation suite.
As mentioned earlier, the safest backup systems are automated or semi-automated. We sell Retrospect backup solutions, as the software is much easier to understand than any other offering, and is more efficient and logical in execution. Retrospect Express comes highly recommended for any site, but higher end solutions are available for larger sites.