Businesses all around the world are hiring tech “professionals” to pick out computers for their business. For anyone that is tech-savvy, this is incredibly silly because picking a computer isn’t an incredibly hard choice with a lot of different variables. In fact, picking a computer and hardware for your office is very easy and can be done in a mere matter of minutes. After reading this article, you’re going to be proficient enough with computers to understand the basics of how to pick a computer regardless of what type of business you run.
Laptop or Computer?
A simple question with a simple answer. If you plan for your employees to make use of mobile office services such as cloud storage, cloud software or custom programs that allow your employees to work from a distance, then a laptop is going to serve them well. When thinking about portability, you need to put an emphasis on battery life, weight and also accessibility. For instance, if the rest of your computers in the office are Windows computers, there is very little reason to get a Macbook for your employees to use outside of the office.
Computers are generally more powerful, so if your office work involves things such as video editing, graphics design, audio production or heavy complex calculations, then you’re going to need desktop workstation computers that are very expensive. However, graphics design and audio production aren’t nearly as demanding as video editing. For graphics design, you’ll need enterprise business monitors to accurate represent all of the colours you need, and for audio production, you’re going to need specialised audio equipment which is out of the scope of this article.
Mac vs Windows
Mac is commonly used for creative work because it is streamlined, simple to use and the sleek design does a good job of improving employee mood and saving desk space. However, if you are at least a bit tech savvy, you’ll realise that Windows offers most, if not more functionality than a Mac computer despite being a little more complicated to use.
If your employees are generally creative types, then invest in Mac computers so they can focus more on designing and creating content instead of being given too many options to customise their Windows experience.
Hardware
We won’t go through typical things like a mouse and keyboard, but we will go into specs.
For a processor, you can work with decade-old hardware if you only plan to do office work, so save money by focusing on cheap prices and ignore the type of hardware—buy whatever is within your budget. If you plan to do video editing, then a powerful computer with four or eight cores will be sufficient. This is typically going to be an Intel processor in the i5 or i7 series. For RAM, the more the better, but 8GB is an absolute minimum. Hard drive space is also very important for video editing because videos are large files, and you will quickly run out of space if you have less than 1 TB.
These are the basics for picking an office computer. In short, it really doesn’t matter what you pick should you need a basic computer for office tasks, but the more complicated or specific your needs are, the more you’ll need to do research.