Small businesses often start at home. Building a company out of your home office can be very rewarding, personally and financially. However, as your business grows, it is time to move away from consumer grade products, such as computers and networking equipment. In short, buying your business computers off the shelf at the local computer store in Boston is a bad idea. There really is a big difference between the equipment that is sold to consumers and what you require for your business. Consumer grade equipment just can’t measure up to the technology available in professional equipment for business.
Home Edition Systems
When you purchase consumer grade equipment, you will typically get an operating system that is known as a “home edition” system. While most people won’t even notice the difference, if you attempt to use a consumer system on your office network you will quickly realize that it is not the same. For example, when comparing the home edition of Microsoft Windows 10 to the most recent version of the professional Windows OS, there are quite a few features missing. Group Policy Management and Domain Join, both of which are required to securely join a corporate network don’t even exist in the home edition.
Sure, you could upgrade the operating system to include these features, but you’ll ultimately end up paying more than it would have cost to just buy professional equipment for business from the beginning. Also, while some things are missing, others get added to a home edition operating system, such as bloatware that must be removed and cleaned up before connecting it to your network and get your new PC to work effectively for business. There are lots of other differences as well, but a business-class computer is designed to meet the needs of a business, offering more storage space and faster processing without needing to upgrade the unit right out of the box.
Anticipated Lifespan
If the goal is to improve productivity in Boston for your business, you definitely won’t get that with consumer grade equipment. If you have ever owned a home computer, you know that these units only last a few years before they need to be replaced. Home computers and networking systems are made with lower quality parts even if they come from the same manufacturer or have a similar model number as the business version. Consumer grade equipment is also not designed for the demands of daily business use, which could cause the unit to need to be replaced even sooner. Even printers, scanners, and other peripheral equipment should only be purchased as professional equipment for business.
When it comes to applying Greater Boston IT solutions to your business for wireless networking, management, and support, you will be recommended to buy professional-grade networking equipment to replace any consumer grade products. Consumer networking equipment is notoriously slow and unreliable. While most people blame the internet service provider for the bad service, the truth is that the fault usually lies in the low-grade hardware that is being used to establish the connection. Not only will business-grade networking equipment help to improve productivity in Boston, but it will also allow better performance for multiple users and prevent slowing, dropped connections, and other reliability issues.
Slower Performance
Have you ever heard marketing where they use the tagline, “move at the speed of business?” That’s because your business should move much faster than consumer grade equipment will allow. Straight out of the box most consumer-grade computers and equipment will be bogged down due to bloatware and significantly slow down performance. It is nearly impossible to remove it all yourself without spending a lot of time going through the entire system to find it and go through the steps required to get rid of it. Even then, much of this bloatware will not go away without a fight, hindering productivity from day one.
Not sure what you need? Synivate provides a wide range of innovative technology solutions for our clients in the Greater Boston area. Whether your goal is to improve productivity, reduce issues associated with consumer grade equipment, or purchase new professional equipment for business, our team can help. We can provide you with a FREE IT assessment to help get you started and offer high-class Greater Boston IT solutions, services, and support that you can use to take your business to the next level. Fully managed services, consulting, cloud computing, hosted applications, and backup solutions are just some of the services that we offer. Call us today at 617-517-0704 or visit our website to download our FREE IT assessment checklist.