Advice needed on setting up a 'proper' small network

[.walls]

Once clients become accustomed to having uninterrupted access to their private and shared data, it becomes a right, it's going to be difficult to justify any kind of down time, regardless of the organisations size. Therefore, XP offering any kind of service from a business perspective becomes inadequate.

Will continue this justification of server OS over client OS as soon as I reach sobriety... lol.

I understand that completely... but at the same time... 3-4 users who have never had server based storage with redundant storage are never going to notice this "right" as they have effectively never had it... They will unlikely have to deal with down time - as XP is a very stable and secure OS (sharing a lot of the features of Server 2k3).

In a business of 3-4 users, it makes a lot more sense to use the spare XP box they have (and I'm *assuming* that it's XP Pro) as a file server. This makes more economic sense than spending - what - £400ish on SBS 2003? For a small business - that's a lot of money when they already have a machine in place which will do the job adequately.

This entirely depends, of course, on whether the OP needs an Exchange system...


EDIT: Although saying that... I've just found SBS for < £100!!!!

 

[aix0]

I'd rather do the job properly first time than come back in a couple of years finding that I need to upgrade hardware / software to accommodate business expansion.

 

[aix0]

Although saying that... I've just found SBS for < £100!!!!

They are transition packs, used to migrate from a SBS environment to a Windows Server environment.

 

[Snapshot]

Wayne, there's some decent advice being given here (for once ) so I'm just going to add some comments. A few words about the router - Netgear products are good and I use one myself but for professional installations I prefer Draytek Vigor. Considerably more expensive than Netgear but worth it for the extra stability, security, etc. If you can get away with using a wired connection for the laptop then do so as using wireless just adds a security risk. The laptop will have a network port.

There are many email servers that are less resource-hungry than Exchange if you really want to have a local server and that make more financial sense for only a few people. I've found MDaemon to be very good. SBS is a comprehensive package but setting it up well is not for the inexperienced. One question I don't think has been asked is if the numper of clients is likely to grow as this will affect the sizing of any solution.