A recipe for a Home Office PC
We live in a wonderful age where having a home office isn’t only for the eccentric or people with disabilities. A rising number of people telecommute and report increased work satisfaction as a result. Think of it: you get to spend more time with the kids and you don’t have to dress up or deal with annoying cubicle neigbors. I’d know, I work from home too and it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
If this is an option for you, or you’ve been considering starting your own home-based business, you’ll be happy to know that over the next couple of months, I will be building a “Home Office PCâ€. I’ll detail my progress each week, along with dandy videos and step by step pictures. I’ll give you a list of everything you need to purchase and everything you need to do to be up and running with a state of the art home office.
In this introductory article however we need to define what makes a Home Office PC different from, say, a gaming PC, or a media center PC. And to do that, you need to think of the needs of a home office worker. What’s important? Well it’s simple: you can’t lose any of the advantages you have while working in an actual office. You should technically be able to do everything short of shaking someone’s hand.
This means many things. Connectivity for one. You want to be able to send and receive faxes, print documents and photocopy things. This means a multifunction printer. You want to be able to teleconference, so you need a good camera and teleconferencing software. If you don’t live alone, it’s a good idea to get headphones so you don’t disturb the entire house also
What else? Larger screens have been shown to increase productivity, so you’ll want one of those. You might be concerned about security and sensitive data. So a way to store data securely should be considered. You need enough juice in the machine (in the form of RAM) to run accounting and office software (and Vista, of course). You might get cellular calls while working, and it might make your life easier to answer them through your headset. This means getting Bluetooth working, along with software that will allow you to take calls on the PC.
On the software side, you’ll want to keep things safe. This means strong and efficient anti-virus, anti-malware programs. Office programs. Teleconferencing. Etc…
Finally, keep in mind that this is still a Home office. So unless you live alone (and even if you do, really), or have a dedicated room for this, you’ll want your little office to blend into your living space. You’ll want to make it small so it doesn’t get in the way, and you’ll want to choose colors that don’t clash with its surroundings. And eliminate cables whenever possible.
So there you have it. A general recipe for a Home Office PC. Next week, we’ll start looking at our shopping list.
Comments
Thank you for your interesting post, I like the slant on how you wrote this post. I definitely think that a virtual office space is a good alternative for startup companies.