The ultimate home office Page 2 of 4

Whether your budget is big or small, we’ve got the perfect Mac setup for you

The bargain office

A budget of $1,500 doesn’t provide you with a lot of wiggle room, but it’s remarkable what you can do with this amount of cash. Here are my recommendations.

The basics

My pick for your computer is the $1,199 2GHz 17-inch iMac Core 2 Duo ( ). People familiar with Apple’s computer offerings understand that the iMac is not the company’s least expensive model. That honor goes to the $599 1.66GHz Mac mini Core Duo ( ). Given the mini’s low price, why recommend a computer that costs twice as much? Because of what the mini lacks and the iMac provides.

Specifically, the mini includes no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. If you don’t have these items (which is the case in this little experiment), you can expect to drop at least $200 or $300 to get them. The 1.66GHz Mac mini Core Duo includes only a Combo drive—a drive capable of reading DVDs and playing and burning CDs but not burning DVDs. This drive won’t let you burn your projects or back up really large files to DVD. The mini offers a scant 512MB of RAM, which can result in poor performance, especially with iLife programs such as GarageBand and iMovie. Likewise, its hard drive is cramped at 60GB. Make a few movies or acquire a decent collection of music and videos from the iTunes Store, and your hard drive is full.

In addition, the mini’s Intel GMA 950 graphics processor, which shares 64MB of the mini’s main memory, is nothing to write home about. (If you plan to spend your off-hours playing 3-D games, definitely cross the mini off your list.) Finally, unlike the rest of the Mac line, the mini includes an Intel Core Duo processor rather than the more powerful Intel Core 2 Duo.

The mini becomes less attractive when you consider what the iMac brings to the table. To begin with, all iMacs offer an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which Apple suggests is up to 50 percent faster than the Core Duo. The 2GHz 17-inch iMac Core 2 Duo satisfies the desire for more RAM and hard-drive space by including 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It also sports an 8x double-layer SuperDrive and includes the ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card, which holds 128MB of its own SDRAM. Add to that a built-in iSight camera, a built-in monitor, built-in speakers, AirPort and Bluetooth, an Apple Remote for controlling Front Row, and an included keyboard and a Mighty Mouse, and you’re looking at a pretty capable Mac that fits a bargain budget.

Why not save $200 by purchasing the $999 1.83GHz 17-inch iMac Core 2 Duo ( )? The lowest-priced iMac is hobbled by its lack of a SuperDrive, an underpowered Intel GMA 950 graphics card, and 512MB of RAM. You could get away with it if you don’t care about backing up your data to DVD or playing games. But although you might think you’d save money by shopping around for RAM instead of getting it preinstalled, times have changed. Having Apple install RAM was once prohibitively expensive, but now the company’s prices are competitive.

Outfitting your office

We’ve burned up $1,200 of our budget already, so we need the biggest bang for the littlest buck for our other office peripherals. The bargain office requires a single device that performs multiple functions, and HP’s Photosmart C6180 does that for just $216.

The Photosmart C6180 includes a color ink-jet printer, a flatbed scanner, a copier, and a fax machine. It includes slots for a variety of media card types, so you can print directly from your cards. The printer uses individual color cartridges, so you needn’t toss out a single multicolor cartridge simply because you’ve run out of one color. And the printer supports both Ethernet and wireless 802.11b networking.

In my experience, HP’s Mac software can be problematic. It always pays to download the latest set of drivers. Fortunately, many of the applications included with HP’s multifunction printers are unnecessary. You can do most of what you want with Apple’s Image Capture and iPhoto, which are included with your Mac.

The best software for the budget

We’ve now spent $1,415 of the budget, which leaves no room for a copy of Microsoft Office. Although I feel that the real thing offers distinct advan-tages over other options, the free, open-source NeoOffice is a reasonable compromise for many people.

Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice doesn’t require that you run the X11 X Window System for it to work (a requirement for Mac users running OpenOffice). NeoOffice opens nearly all Office documents you throw at it, including Word files and Excel spreadsheets (save for some created by the Windows-specific Microsoft Office 2007), and, for the most part, maintains the original document’s look-and-feel. (PowerPoint presentations may lose embedded media, and cus-tom bullets may appear as odd characters, for example). You can also save your NeoOffice documents in native Microsoft Office formats so that others can open them.

Media Software Every new Mac includes a free copy of Apple’s iLife multimedia suite, and with only $85 left in your budget, free is just about what you can afford. Fortunately, iLife works great. From making movies to burning those movies to DVD, organizing your photos and music, creating attractive Web sites, and making music, iLife has you covered.

AppleWorks was once bundled with many new Macs, but Apple has set its easy-does-it office suite adrift. NeoOffice covers most of AppleWorks’ capabilities—including a drawing component—but nothing in NeoOffice or bundled with the Mac allows you to unleash your inner artist. To do so, you need a good paint program, and the best bargain-basement Mac painting program currently available is Ambient Design’s $20 ArtRage 2. ArtRage 2 is a natural media painting program, offering tools that emulate paint, chalk, pen, crayon, and airbrush set in an intuitive interface. Although a painting program may seem out of sync with a Mac meant for work, bear in mind that with little effort a good paint program can help you enhance business cards, flyers, reports, and presentations.

If you’d care to save $20, go with ArtRage 2 Free. Unlike with the full version, ArtRage 2 Free doesn’t support layers, nor do you get the full complement of tools—no airbrush or paint roller, for example. However, even without these capabilities, it’s a useful painting application, and you can’t beat the price.

Finance Software For handling the finances of the average home office, Intuit’s Quicken Mac 2007 ( ) is the way to go. Although its list price is $70, we found that Costco sells it online for just $50.

Adding it up

You’ve spent a total of $1,485. What to do with the remaining $15? There are any number of worthwhile and inexpensive shareware utilities that deserve your attention, but in order to put them to good use, you need the continued use of your hands, wrists, and arms.

To help keep those parts of your body in operational order, we’ll use up much of the remainder with the Belkin WaveRest Gel Mouse Pad. Available for just $10, the pad will help keep your mouse hand more comfortable.

True, it would be wise to pocket the money you have left. But consider this: There’s a world of great software for which the author asks nothing but a small donation. Visit MacUpdate or VersionTracker.com, find something “free” that you love, and send the author your $5.