office computers x4 - budget build

[Nico_Joey]

Hey, i'm looking to build 4/5 office computers for my parents commpany. They all have monitors of a servieable conditon, the operating systems are unkown at the moment (staying with xp or moving to vista, aswell as office ms office licenses ).

What i am looking for is a spec to do office heavy work whilst working with printers/scanners and a sever. I have built two systems allready, both with an e5200 and one with 4gigs of ram and vista business(64bit) the other 2gigs and xp-pro, both had similar hard-drives and motherboard.
Unfortunatly both where over-budget and so i would very much welcome anyones help with a simple but effective template for 4/5 computers.



p.s. these towers will be replacing 2/3 year old hp/delll p4/512ram/etc pre build machines

 

[mp260767]

might be an idea to post a budget .

 

[Audigex]

I'd strongly recommend using thin clients (minimal hardware and very little/no software) and a central server (for file storage and to serve up the operating system & programs). You'll likely have to do some research into it, but if you're willing to put some effort in it should be worth it.

For just doing basic office work, you can save an absolute bomb. Call it £400 for the central server and maybe £150-200 for each extra machine = £1000-1400 for the lot.

If you can use linux (this may depend on the willingness of your parents) that would practically be the entire cost - just a relatively cheap 5/6port switch (or two 4-ports) and a handful of ethernet cables.

The entire budget, including networking hardware, could be done for £1500 or less.

Edit: this also gives a bonus on security and upgradeability. Next time you needed to upgrade you could just put £300 of new parts into the server, and the rest can stay how it is. You also only need to run virus scans on the central server.

 

[nex20]

What audigex said ^^