Think of Business PCs when you think of total cost of ownership

Is "one size fits all" true in the PC industry? In the beginning, it was. But, as businesses began to regard PCs as essential productivity tools, while families were increasingly using PCs as devices that let them learn, play, communicate and entertain themselves, two distinct breeds of PCs emerged. These were the business PCs and the home PCs. Examples for the first category are Acer Power series, Compaq Deskpro series, Fujitsu Siemens SCENIC series, HP Brio and Vectra series and IBM PC series, while some of the most popular home PCs are Acer Aspire, HP Pavilion, Compaq Presario and IBM Aptiva.

Knowledge workers in offices do not need ear-shattering speakers with a powerful subwoofer, curvy and colorful casing, and additional keys on the keyboard that provide one-touch control on Internet access, compact disc playback, volume control and so on. What they need is a PC that is manageable, controllable, upgradeable and accountable.

Imagine you own a company with 400 employees, each of whom has a PC. Will you notice if any of your employees takes away PC parts such as the SDRAM or the Zip drive and use them in their own PCs at home? If you use business PCs, you will.

Business PCs are built around a concept known as Total Coast of Ownership (TOC). According to Gartner Group, which first introduced the concept, the purchase price of a PC is just one fraction of the total cost that a company has to pay over the entire lifetime of that machine. There are the costs of training, support, maintenance, upgrading and others. A business PC with a good TCO will be one that is networkable, easy to manage, easy and cheap to maintain as well as easy and cheap to upgrade.

Business PCs are equipped with tools for easy management, such as Advanced Desktop Management from Acer, TopTools from HP and LANDesk from Intel. These tools allow an administrator to do a lot of things over the network from his console. He can take stock of what is inside every PC in his company, so that when an employee ever opens the casing he will know about it. The administrator can also upgrade the operating system and even applications, such as Microsoft Office, on thousands of PCs at once from one signal point, thereby reducing the cost of manpower. He can be warned if one of the PCs is about to break down. A lot of other managing tasks are done automatically.

There has also been a trend toward using sealed, diskless boxes connected to servers in workplaces such as banks, schools, small offices, etc. One of these boxes is the new WT300 from Acer, which was launched during the recent Jakarta Computer Expo '99. In the Acer WT300 configuration, all applications and files reside on the server machine and, therefore, all file control, software installation and upgrading, as well as user management take place on the server.

The WT300 is powered by the Cyrix MediaGX LV 200 MHz processor and features the Cyrix CX 5530 chipset. Using only one DIMM (Dual Inline Memory Module), the WT300 can support 32 or 64 MB of non- ECC RAM, and supports an onboard AMD AM79C973 10/100 Base T Ethernet interface.

The small box of the WT300 can operate either vertically or horizontally to optimize desktop space. Because there is no floppy diskette drive or CD-ROM drive, there will be no problem of virus infection, installation of pirated software or stolen data.

Where access needs to be restricted, WT300 can even be equipped with a smart card reader that provides hardware-level security control.