The ultimate home office

by Christopher Breen, Macworld.com  

The middle-of-the-road office

If you feel pinched by a $1,500 budget but aren’t willing to fully fling open the financial floodgates, you’re looking at the middle-of-the-road office—one that costs no more than $3,000. With this budget, you can get a more-powerful computer.

The basics

The iMac was once the inexpensive “Mac for the rest of us,” but it has turned from a moderate all-in-one performer into nigh on a desktop powerhouse. For this budget, I recommend the $1,499 2.16GHz 20-inch iMac Core 2 Duo ( ).

The iMac offers many of the same benefits found in the 17-inch iMac I recommend for the bargain office—a built-in iSight camera, a built-in monitor, built-in speakers, AirPort and Bluetooth, an 8x double-layer SuperDrive, 1GB of RAM, and the ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card (which you can upgrade from 128MB of SDRAM to 256MB for an additional $75). When you spend that extra $300, you gain a slightly faster Core 2 Duo processor, more screen real estate (with a resolution of 1,680 by 1,050 pixels versus the 17-incher’s 1,440 by 900), and a 250GB hard drive.

In Search of Screen Space Why not trade down or up? Even a 20-inch display can be a little cramped, particularly if you work with large spreadsheets or use applications that include lots of palettes. If your work requires only more screen real estate—not a more expansive hard drive—you might consider rejiggering our budget to accommodate a second monitor. In that case, I’d add Apple’s $19 Mini-DVI to DVI Adapter and Dell’s UltraSharp 2007FP 20-inch Black Flat Panel Monitor. It’s bright and sharp, offers multiple video inputs (including VGA, S-Video, and composite inputs), and is inexpensive (it costs around $400). NEC and ViewSonic also make good-looking, although slightly more expensive, LCD monitors.

If your desk is too small to accommodate two monitors, the $1,999 2.16GHz 24-inch iMac Core 2 Duo ( ) is another option. But you’d eat up two-thirds of your budget just to gain another four inches of monitor space and a faster graphics card, Nvidia’s GeForce 7300. I can think of better uses for the money, such as sticking with the 20-inch iMac and adding another gigabyte of RAM—an expense of $175 if you do it through Apple.

Again, you can actually save money these days by getting your RAM preinstalled. For example, when I compared Apple’s RAM prices with those of Crucial, a popular RAM vendor, Apple’s prices were lower at press time. That extra gigabyte of RAM makes your iMac a little zippier by allowing the computer to use RAM rather than resorting to virtual memory, which is slower because it uses the hard drive.

Outfitting your office

With a middle-of-the-road budget, you can think outside the box—specifically, the box that held your Mac. Extra storage and alternate input devices will enhance your computing environment.

Extra Storage An external hard drive provides a fast and easy-to-access destination for your backup files. You’ll need such a drive to use Time Machine, the slick-looking backup utility built into the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). But since all Mac users should back up important data, you can put that drive to good use right now.

OWC’s $250 500GB Mercury Elite-AL 800 Pro FireWire 800/400 includes a 7,200-rpm drive and both FireWire 400 and 800 ports (but no USB 2.0 port). Better yet, Prosoft Engineering’s Data Backup ( ) is bundled with the drive, saving you the cost of purchasing a separate utility.

Input Devices You’ve got a little money to burn and, because you do, there’s no reason to settle for the limited Mighty Mouse that Apple includes with your iMac. A more versatile mouse can be had in the form of Logitech’s MX Revolution Mouse ( ), which I found for $80 at both Costco.com and Amazon.com. This five-button, two scroll-wheel cordless mouse is highly configurable, precise, and—in my humble opinion—comfortable.

A Pair of Printers Sometimes you have to give a little to get a lot. In this case, you’ll give a little more money for the hardware and, down the road, save a lot on consumables by purchasing a multifunction printer, such as HP’s LaserJet 3055 (priced at $425 at Amazon.com), that incorporates a monochrome laser printer rather than a color ink-jet. Printer manufacturers sell their ink-jet printers for very little money, knowing that they’ll make it up in the expensive inks these printers require. So, if you primarily print black-and-white documents, you’re better off choosing a laser printer.

In addition to a laser printer, this HP multifunction printer includes a flatbed scanner, a copier, and a fax machine. The printer comes standard with a 250-sheet input tray and a 50-sheet automatic document feeder. It can connect to a network over Ethernet. And you can find compatible toner cartridges for under $25.

What the HP LaserJet 3055 lacks is photo printing, and most home offices require it. Because of its price and the quality of the prints it produces, we recommend HP’s Photosmart D7360 (which costs $134 on Amazon.com). Although it’s not the fastest photo ink-jet printer in the world, the D7360 includes separate ink cartridges, bears a large touch-screen LCD, and accepts a variety of memory cards.

The best software for the budget

If you routinely work with documents created by both the Mac and Windows versions of Microsoft Office and require complete compatibility with those documents, you should run the real thing— Microsoft Office 2004. Unlike with NeoOffice, you won’t encounter formatting problems and PowerPoint presentations won’t lose their embedded media. Our one regret is that Microsoft Office 2008—a fully Universal edition of the ubiquitous office suite—won’t ship until the lat-ter half of 2007. It seems a shame to drop $300 (the Amazon.com price) for Office 2004 with a new version coming so soon. On the other hand, Microsoft Office 2004 runs perfectly well under Apple’s Rosetta, and you may be happy enough with its performance that you see no need to upgrade to the next version. Also, if you have a minor child in school or your mate is a teacher, you qualify for the Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2004, which costs just $130 at Amazon.com (and may be even less expensive at the school bookstore).

Office Additions In addition to Microsoft Office, I recommend Apple’s iWork ($70 at Amazon.com). You just can’t make the kind of rich-looking documents with Microsoft Word that you can with Pages. It’s a great tool to have when you need to make a simple newsletter or brochure. You can also create much cooler presentations with Keynote than with PowerPoint.

Media Software Yes, Apple’s free iLife and the $20 ArtRage 2 are not only good enough for the bargain office, they’re good enough for people with a midlevel budget.

Finance Software You need to track expenses just as closely as other home-office dwellers do. Quicken Mac 2007 ($50 from Costco.com) is an inexpensive way to do it.

Adding it up

You’ve spent $3,003 and are just a bit over budget. Thankfully, because you’re at home, it should take only a few minutes to dig beneath the couch cushions and make up the difference.

Middle-of-the-road office shopping list