Most business PC’s won’t win any “best gaming PC” awards, but are powerful enough to handle having more than a few applications open at one time. For the sake of simplicity, we’ve divided business PC users into three categories, based on their needs and usage: Typical, Advanced, and Expert. We’ll define their usage patterns and needs, and highlight some of the hardware needed to help them complete their jobs.

For the Typical PC Users

Typically spends most of their time with emails, managing contacts and appointments, doing word processing, and even some light number crunching. They don’t need a heavy-lifting PC, but they need something more than economy or bargain basement class in terms of power and storage. Make it easier for your employees to do their jobs: Don’t make them squint at a tiny screen, and make sure they can transfer files to and fro with a flash drive, CDs, DVDs, and over the network.

For the Advanced PC Users

These are the experienced semi-pros of the office, often tasked with doing research, writing a little code, crunching account data, or editing proposals. This type of user needs more power for multitasking and more space for storage.

Expert PC Users

This is your IT guy, programmer or graphic designer who needs a lot of PC muscle. He may or may not have that condescending, derisive tone when he describes how to edit that graphic, or how he sanitized the database inputs. This could be someone you rely on to make your marketing material, design and code your website, or create a help system for your software, and they need a heavy-hitter of a system: something with a lot of memory and processing power, lots more storage, and in some cases, dual monitor support.

We haven’t covered every scenario, but this is a starting point to get you thinking about what kind of users you have, and what kind of business PC’s they’ll need when buying time rolls around.

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Typical PC User

These computers should have at least:

• 512 MB of RAM, with the capacity for upgrades
• A 1.5 GHz processor, or CPU, but preferably 2 GHz
• 80 GB of hard drive space
• 17” LCD monitor
• CD/DVD burner and frontal USB ports to move your presentations via CD, DVD, or flash drive

Advanced PC User

More power is necessary here. With multiple browser windows, spreadsheets, word documents, and maybe some graphics editing going on here, don’t make this person wait for their computer to think. A good baseline is:

• 1-2 GB of RAM, again with upgrade capacity
• 2-3 GHz processor
• 120 GB of hard drive space
• 19” LCD monitor
• CD/DVD burner
• Consider an extra hard drive, internal or external, for backups

Expert PC User

They might not go out and get new accounts, or sell your products to the masses, but these people keep your servers running, your websites up-to-date and flashy, and your data secure. See to it they can get their jobs done with the right systems. Start with:

• 3 GB of RAM, always with the capacity for more
• Either an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.x GHz, or an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0 GHz Dual-Core
• 2 or more internal hard drives, mirrored for fault tolerance, and an external for further backups
• 21” Wide-screen LCD monitor, or two 19” LCD monitors (make sure the video card will support two monitors!)
• Speaking of video cards, if this person is rendering illustrations or 3D animations, make sure the card has at least 256 MB of RAM
• CD/DVD burner