Setting up your Home Office

What you will need for a home office

Computer - You will need a good computer system with reasonable memory, disk, and processor speed to edit documents and to send and receive email. Depending on your business, and an special software requirements, you might need a more powerful system, but if all you will be using your computer for is word processing, email, and surfing the web, most basic systems priced at around $1,000 should be adequate for your needs. While I presonally prefer Linux as an operating system, unless you are very advanced computer users and already familiar with maning a Linux system, my advice is that you get a system running the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, which will likely already be installed on the system you purchase. Most commercial software runs on Windows XP, whereas running Linux more understanding by users and there is lots of software that will not run.

It is absolutely critical that you run antivirus software on your system, and you should also enable your windows firewall (part of XP), or an alternative firewall from Norton or McAffee to protect your system from viruses and worms. Be sure to update the virus definition files on a regular basis.

With any computer system it is important to have tools and a schedule for backing up your data so that the data is not lost if you computer is damaged or stolen. This is particularly important for your home office system. In addition to backing up the data to local media (e.g. writable DVD's), I suggest also storing one copy of your backup off site (at work if you have another office, at a relatives house, in a safe deposit box). Keep in mind, however, that any confidential data stored on backups needs to be protected appropriately especially when stored off-site.

Please see the computer page for recomendations of other software you might want to install.

• Internet access - You will want high speed internet access from your computer. See the internet access page for more information about your choices for internet access. In particular, for your home office, you will want to consider setting up a local area network so that you can share your network connection across more than one computer and allow shared access to printer's, scanner's, and fax machines connected to your network.

• Printer - You will need at a minimum a black and white printer. I recommend a laser printer as they are faster, provide higher quality output than an ink-jet printer, and are less expensive in the long run. You will pay more up front for the printer, but you will pay less per page for supplies (paper and toner), probably around 3.5 cents per page or less. Though discouraged by the manufactueres, for many printers you can reduce the cost even further by refulling the toner cartriges yourself. If you need color printing, it might be more cost effective to get a black and white laser printer, and a separate laser or ink jet color printer, depening on your color printing requirements.

  I strongly suggest that you consider Laser multi-function printer, which also serves as a scanner, fax, and copying machine. If you have a need for any of these additional functions, the combined package will use less table space than would multiple devices. The cost will also be less than the combined cost of the invidiual devices. The other option to consider is a network ready printer or multi-function device. If you set up a local area network in your house, this will allow the pinter to be used from any of your computers without having to move it around or disconnect and reconnect wires.

  After considerable research, I selected the Brother Laser Multi-Function printer for my home office. There are three versions of this printer, which I describe below. All versions provide a laser printer supporting up to 2400x600 dpi at up to 21 pages per minute, a color canner with a resolution of up to 600x2400 dpi, both a flatbed and automatic document feeder, and a fax machine. If purchased at a good discount, you can expect to pay from around $400 to $575 depending on the model. Because they offer significant discounts, most sites will not display the price until you add the item to your shopping cart. You may have to add the item to your card to see the price, then remove the items from your card if you do not want to make the purchase.

  • Brother MFC-8440 Laser Multifunction Printer - Supports single sided printing, and connects to your computer via USB (i.e. it does not have a network interface). If you only occasionally require two sided printing, you can do so manually by printing odd pages first, then taking the ouput and putting it the paper tray pinted side up, then prining even pages.

  • Brother MFC-8840D Duplex Laser Multifunction Printer - Supports double sides (duplex) printing, and connects to your computer via USB (i.e. it does not have a network interface).

  • Brother MFC-8840DN Network Duplex Laser Multifunction Printer - Supports double sides (duplex) printing, and connects to your local area network, supporting printing, scanning, and faxing from multiple computers and email access for your faxes.

  • If you buy the MFC-8440 and the MFC-8840D and later install a local area network, you can upgrade these to network versions by purchasing and installing a special network card.

• Scanner - A scanner provides a way to read physical documents, drawings, and photographs into a computer so that they can be stored, integrated in documents, printed, or faxed. Most scanners come with optical character recognition software that can read the words off a scanned page and insert the words into a wordprocessor or other application.

  If you need both a scanner and a printer, I suggest getting a multi-function printer as described above. The scanners on such printers are usually capable of scanning in color even if the printer is black and white. You will want to consider the resolution and featurs of the scanner when choosing such a multi-function pinter.

• Fax - It is no longer necessary to get a second phone line to support a home office fax machine. Many fax machines work fine on one's primary phone line and are even compatible with answering machines, although there are likely not compatible with the voice mail services offered by your phone service provider. Fax machines are also not compatible with cell phones, and will likely not work with internet based local telephone services (the will work with cable based phone services like those offered by comcast).

  If you will be using a fax machine on your primary phone line, then when choosing a fax machine, be sure to read the features to make sure it will work for your setup.

  If you do not need a physical fax machine, there are options for sending and receiving faxes that do not require the use of your phone line at all. For around $13 (in March 2005), eFax will provide you with a dedicated fax number and will email faxes received on that number to your internet mailbox. You can send faxes from your computer for $0.10 per page by "printing" them to the fax server. Depending on the number of faxes you send, this could be cheaper than gettng a second phone line for your fax machine, although still more expensive than sharing your primary phone line with your fax. To send a fax of a paper document using eFax requires a scanner to scan the document before it can be sent over the internet to the eFax servers. Service like eFax are very usful when you are away from your home office since the faxes are emailed and can be viewed anywhere you have a network connection.

  Some multi-function printer fax devices, in particular, the networked version of the Brother unit described above (MFC-8840DN) are capable of emailing a fax when it is received, providing the ability to view your faxes by email from a fax machine connected to your primary phone line.

• Copy Machine - If you need a copy machine for your office my recomendation is to invest in the multi-function printer described in the printer section of this page. For those times when the purpose of making a copy is to keep a copy of a document you are sending to someone else, and where you would likely discard the copy after some action is completed, you can use the scanner function of the multi-function printer to scan the document to disk, saving paper and print costs, and making it easier to find the documents you need it. If you ultimately need the copy, print from the scanned copy. When it is no longer needed, delete it from disk.

• Telephone - You will need a telephone within ready reach of your desk. If you need frequent access to the phone and others in your family often tie up the phone, you should consider a second line for your office. If your phone is used infrequently, consider a second phone number (which rings differently) for a single phone line. Your phone service provider likely offers this service under the name "distincive ring". While a cell phone can be used as a second phone, or even as a primary phone, it is not recommended for used in a home office because the connection quality will somtimes interfere with your ability to communicate. If you require a fax line, a cell phone will not work. See the telephone page of this this site for more information on your choices for telephone service.