Building a net cafe

  • Thread starter Thread starter B&W
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How about second hand dell 2.4 gig p4 desktops can be had for about 75 pound with a xp key from an auctuion and then just build a server to run your net work.Just noticed that is not your own internet cafe . You could still charge for reconditioning and upgrading .Ie less money on hard ware more money in your pocket.
 
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just food for thought.

about 6 months ago the works pc i use died and I talked boss into getting a new system.

Anyway, after looking around I was able to pic up a nice little machine from the usual po;ular auction site for 210 quid all in, and that is a e2160 (1.8) 250gig Hd etc. All new with warranty etc. there are plenty of options to get cheap machines. Add to that a cheap £70 monitor, and cheap kb / mouse / headphone combo and you are withinthe £300 budget for doing nothing more than clicking a few buttons. And again that would be an easy machine to upgrade to a gaming rig if they decide to do lan gaming as well.

As Fester has said, think about a second hand rig, if you really want to, stick them in a new £25 case to make them look newer and uniform.

when you get them, if you are installing yourself, to speed things up, set up one machine totally, including service packs, then install ghost 10, put each hard drive in individually and ghost it over, making sure you pick the right options. Takes abtou 15 minutes to do each machine, instead of about 3 hours to install, service pack etc etc

For virus protection, dont disregard the likes of AVG which is still free and more than capable.
 
Captain_Slick said:
Quad core is just completely unnecessary for net cafe computers. I guess it depends on whether he wants to spend £1500 or £2500.
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Little exaggerated, the 410s would come about 120quid over the budget for 6PCs rather than 1000. Though it's not a requirement it is quite beneficial with things like on access virus and spyware scanning which you will definitely want maxed up.
This is a business in the end and it needs to compete with what's already out there, thus getting bare minimum seems foolish. Generally if given a budget you are expected to get the best you can for the money. Seeing as the budget was 300 + whatever cost for building them from scratch I'd say £320 per PC is on budget, and gives them hardware they can brag about and use to an advertising advantage.
If you used two cafes one with second hand P4 rigs one with shiny new spyware free quad core systems, which would you go back to?
 
Where are you getting £320 from?

They're £220 for the base machine. Add in monitor, that's £300 at least. XP (since Vista would just result in a massive headache when trying to run the software required for a netcafe) would bring that up to £370. Then you've got the added cost of software (Afterall, who's going to go to a netcafe just to use the trial Office and Internet Explorer?), say £400. Webcams/speakers/headsets bring it to say £450 per machine. For 6, that'd be £2700 for them fully kitted out. Not to mention the increased power requirements of the Quad.
 
+1 for a Dell Vostro.

If it's a business you don't want to mess around, and the warrantys/restore disks will be invaluable.

The Vostro 200 is £249+vat with the monitor.
 
If you read the guy's posts the 200-300 doesn't include the software. Inclusive of software £300 is folly. You could easily spend 250 on apps if you arn't going the Opensource route. (which I personally would). Things such as headsets are pointless to include as for a net cafe they're pretty much consumables.
As I said before, it the budget is written in stone then he has little option than to go with the 200 or build himself, but if he can squeeze a bit more (which by the sounds of it he can) then there's no reason at all not to get the 410s. The better the PCs the more people will be willing to pay to use them. At the end of the day it's setting up a business with the aim of being competitive and making money.
 
Even if you knock the price of software and the other bits off my estimate, it's still £350-400 a machine.

Most people who use internet cafes aren't going to be bothered about Quad core. So long as there are computers with all the software they could need, they'll be happy.

I doubt the profit margin in internet cafes are that large, so you want to spending as little as possible on the actual machines, because the rest (like you said, consumables, wiring and software) will soon add up.

There's no point going the whole hog without getting some basic usage down first. Spend as little as possible on the basic machines, and then run a customer survey to find out if they want to game on the PCs. The Vostro 200s will take another 1GB of ram and a half decent graphics card no problem, which will be pennies once you're getting a constant revenue.

However, I doubt you'll need to do that, since most people go to an internet cafe to catch up on email/messenger, school work, research and browse the net. The dual core is more than enough for that. No point spending more than you have to. You could offer printer/photocopying services. However, that'd be something to add down the line unless you can afford it now.

Edit: You might also want to look at this: http://www.ncomputing.com/internet-cafes.aspx

Could be a good alternative to buying 6 machines, a server, etc.
 
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Skidilliplop said:
I reckon the 800MHz dual core would struggle a bit.
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Captain_Slick said:
The 200 doesn't have an 800Mhz dual core... it's a E2180. 2Ghz.
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Skidilliplop said:
Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core E2180 Processor (2.00GHz,800MHz,1MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium SP1 - English
Microsoft® Works 9.0 - English
Display Not Included
1024MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x512]
160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache
Integrated Intel® Graphic Media Accelerator X3100
16x DVD +/- RW Drive
Dell™ Entry Quietkey USB Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY)
Dell 2 Button USB Optical Mouse


^^ E2180 800MHz FSB.
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I seriously hope you're not suggesting that the E2180 is a 800MHz cpu even after Captain_Slick has pointed out that it's not and you've posted the specs that show that it isn't!! :eek:

And Captain_Slick is right, and the OP should listen to him. The E2180 is plenty fast enough for a net cafe machine and even some light gaming.

Personally I'd build them the machine's myself so that they have to pay me to look after them. ;)
 
The 800Mhz I refer to is the Frontside Bus speed. which IS 800MHz the same as a P4. This hurts the upgrade path of the machines as I'll bet heavily they won't support 1333MHz CPUs. This is mainly because they're not designed to last they are designed to be bought, used for a year or two or until they break, then binned and replaced. You don't really want buy and bin hardware first off as the hardware is your second biggest investment in a netcafe.

There is no right or wrong answer, only good and better ones. I'm just passing on the benefit of experience. In my previous job as a deployment engineer for an IT solutions company I set up a fair few netcafes aswell as public net access areas in hotels and airports.
Whether the OP would rather save 200 quid or so is up to him. But in my experience £200 isn't worth cutting corners for.
 
ooh lots of replies. :p thx guys.

Well I can get the pcs for around £250 each.

ill charge em 350 per pc.

350*7= 2450
xp licenses= 630
antivirus licenses= 100
networking equipment (includes cabling,tools etc) = 250
printer= 100

3530

How much should I charge them for labour?

Someone told me a grand, I will be asking a mate to help and we will need to do route all the wires, setup all the pcs and equipment from start to finish.

So I need to pay him off too and he was looking for around £400.

I dont want too charge them too much extra, what would you guys say?
 
£200 per machine, so £1200 total.

Also, the Vostro 200's motherboard uses the G33 chipset, so supports 1333Mhz FSB processors should he need to upgrade.

However, I fail to see why the 800Mhz FSB of the E2180 matters. So what it's the same speed as the P4s? The E2180 will blow any P4 out of the water at stock, let alone overclocked.

TBH, I'm suprised you know so little if you've got all that experience. I've never set up any sort of netcafe or public access setup, yet your idea that internet cafes are going to need more than a modern dual core is ludicrous. They aren't going to using 3ds max for crying out loud!

Also, B&W, have a look at that NComputing stuff. One desktop computer running up to 30 clients. It would work out much cheaper for you in the long run.
 
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The pcs im getting for the public:

AMD Sempron LE-1150 2.00GHz
1GB PC2-5300 667MHz DDR2 Memory
80GB SATA2 HDD
20x SATA DVDRW
17" TFT
webcam
headset
keyb/mouse

The main machine will be a :

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ 2.3GHz
2GB PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 Memory
200GB SATA2 HDD
 
Interesting ideas captain, at the moment my main worry is the installation charge, im thinking of making it 1k. I've done this stuff before but it was for a family friend so I didn't charge him too much, this time its different though.

I'm trying to find some quotes on the web but cant see much.
 
B&W said:
Interesting ideas captain, at the moment my main worry is the installation charge, im thinking of making it 1k. I've done this stuff before but it was for a family friend so I didn't charge him too much, this time its different though.

I'm trying to find some quotes on the web but cant see much.
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If you can get a grand then great, go for it! I think its on the high side personally. The last 6 system network me and a mate did took 4.5 hrs including installing xp from scratch on every computer. If you both know what you are doing then it doesn't take long.

We cheated (laziness) and bought in the network cables (100% markup on charge out price though ;)). Total labour charge to the business customer was £500 - £200 for my mate, £300 for me. I reckon I made another grand on the parts, materials etc. More on the support.

To me over £1300 for 4.5 hours actually work was a good pay day. (of course there was lots of reserch on evenings to spec it all up)

But perhaps it was me that was too cheap? :D

Small computer outfits (low overheads, no offices etc) round where I live charge £20-25 per hour (of course this will increase as you go south) so either you reckon it will takeover 40 hours or you are looking for more than £25 per hour?

On another note I went with the Dell systems in the end as well as I couldn't buy the parts for the money they were charging for the system built. That meant all hardware support was with Dell, all software support with me. I did however bill them as an "extra" for the 3 years hardware warranty ;)

Also I got a "proper" server from the dell outlet (cost £2000, reduced to £540) with a raid card, dual cpu capable, lots of memory etc.
 
1k thats bit steep, theres a thing called being to greedy, even if you worked at £50 an hour you should earn no more than £500 especially for a small 6 pc network your doing.
It sounds to me that your not very experienced in this area.

Also another thing that net cafe software you looked at is bad, there are tonnes of good net cafe software available.

Ive done a business plan for a gaming cafe and i think your pricing is OTT.
 
My Mate said he would love to learn to about doing the above. He has been asked to setup networks and once an internet cafe with 3 PC's!! Thing is, he is not 100% up on that side of things. He is good at building PC's etc though. Any good books on the subject i can point him to?
 
J.B said:
Also here's a tip, stop calling it a hub. If you're setting up an internet café Id like to think you have a bit of networking knowledge.
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Hubs are layer 1
Switches are layer 2

Hubs and switches are different devices.

A switch would be more suited to an internet café, a hub would probably do the job sufficiently to begin with as you're only using 6 computers, but rather go for a switch, especially if the company is thinking of expanding.

Captain_Slick said:
Quad core is just completely unnecessary for net cafe computers. I guess it depends on whether he wants to spend £1500 or £2500.
Click to expand...

Definitely, even if the internet café had games on the computers a dual core would be more than sufficient.
 
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