Discussion on:

Laptop & NAS help - Small business with budget

Hi
I have a client who runs a bookkeeping business and has secured a grant to update their existing office setup. They have 1500 (inc vat) to spend on 2x laptops, 2x Office H&B 2010, and a NAS (my recommendation).

Basically, the 2x staff mostly work in the same office but sometimes work remotely. 2x decent laptops (one for each) required - I was thinking HP Probooks as I've had good experience with them but i5's are killing the budget. Office suite is pretty standard. I thought of a single bay Synology NAS to use and then cloud incremental backup or a cheaper two bay NAS (Buffalo or something) and then RAID 1 to mirror.

Any help would be much appreciated - I'm struggling to get below 2k without skimping on what I think they need.

Thanks in advance

i5 for quickbooks, spreadsheets, and office? What's wrong with a Core2Duo, an i3, or an AMD chip? Seriously, you don't need much CPU power and new laptops will kill your budget. SSD's for the laptops should be a little more durable than spinning disks.

As for the NAS, yeah, but more like 4 bay, RAID 5. Just remember that RAID is NOT backup.

Or... how about a full-featured router? My Linksys E3000 with dd-wrt has all the NAS and FTP features I could want. You could put an external 3TB hdd on it. Then get another one to be a backup for that one. Ideally, you'll want some decent wired/wireless networking between 2 laptops and the file storage. Networked printer? or just shared?