Does anyone have a suggestion for minimum specs for a new business PC? Small business running Office and Quickbooks and tons of pictures for reproduction, Adobe Photoshop? Want a screaming desktop! I have one in mind, but am unsure of myself.

AMD 64 or Pentium 600 series. 200G or better hard drive. Medium High end ATI or NVidia graphics adapter. Dual layer, dual format DVD burner. 1 G of RAM. Most of this is because of the photo editing. Without that you can reduce the RAM, the hard drive and the video adapter.

What exactly are you photo editing plans? Are you into serious graphic design and rendering "stuff" ?

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Originally Posted by psi42

What exactly are you photo editing plans? Are you into serious graphic design and rendering "stuff" ?

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No serious graphic design. Just storing wildlife pictures for future upload to our website.

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Originally Posted by mazzie

No serious graphic design. Just storing wildlife pictures for future upload to our website.

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Okay, well that REALLY changes things.
You said you wanted minimum specs, so here you go:

600-800 mhz AMD Duron
256 MB RAM
Some Random Cheap Motherboard (TM)
Generic CD-ROM
Integrated graphics and sound (see motherboard)
Hard drive: 5 GB + however much you need for photos. It really depends how many photos we're talking about here, and how large they are, but I'd recommend at least 40 GB.

I do know from personal experience that a nice machine with a 450mhz Pentium-2 and 128MB RAM has plenty of power to run MS windows XP and MS office.


The listed system should be perfectly sufficient to run an office suite and Quickbooks PROVIDED you can keep the system free from malware (spyware, trojan horses, and other nasties). If you can't do that, you might as well go buy yourself an Opteron so you can run Word concurrently with whatever crap might sneak in.

This system will NOT be able to run MS Windows Longhorn.
This desktop will NOT "scream" but it will work. If you want to scream, buy an Opteron. ;)

IF you're going to be doing more than storing photos (i.e. applying image filters to a large number of them), you're probably going to want a much better processor and more RAM.

IF you're going to do any of the following: massive image editing, movie editing, dvd authoring, gaming, compiling large software projects, animation rendering, traveling to the moon, etc, you NEED a better system.

~psi42