HP's Compaq dx2250 and Dell's Vostro 200 pair the companies' most basic hardware designs with small-business services.Photograph: Marc Simon
Tech companies are redoubling their efforts to attract small-business customers with low-cost desktops and targeted software and services. Small-business buyers, however, would do better to avoid Dell's and HP's new low-end small-business PCs and instead stick with those companies' products for large enterprise customers.
Dell's entry-level Vostro 200, the first desktop in its new small-business line of products, costs $1198 with a 20-inch display and a one-year warranty. HP's entry-level business PC, the Compaq dx2250, costs $1413 with a 19-inch LCD monitor and a three-year plan. These two PCs lack the innovative hardware features found in some other models in Dell's and HP's lines--even machines that cost little more than these systems. For example, the plainly designed Vostro 200 and dx2250 lack the convenience of tool-less mechanisms.
Thanks to a discrete graphics card and more RAM than the previously tested Compaq dc5750, the dx2250 earned a score of 70 on our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 tests--a result that was 13 percent better than that of the dc5750, which had the same 2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor. The Vostro 200, equipped with a 1.86-GHz Core 2 Duo E6320 CPU, achieved a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 80; that's the best mark among the value systems we've tested running Windows Vista.
Services for Business
Both PCs come with software and services designed to help their owners work better. For example, Dell's Automated PC Tune-Up utility runs 30 different maintenance tasks, such as cleaning out temp files and cookies and defragmenting your hard drive, with one click. Access to this tool and 10GB of online storage is free for only the first year, though.
HP has a similar tool set called HP Total Care Advisor. One component monitors PC health and security; another, Business Solutions, provides access to free or inexpensive online classes covering software, business skills, and IT concerns.
Dell boasts that Vostro PCs "come without annoying trialware preinstalled." True, our Vostro 200 bore no desktop trial-offer icons, but it did sport icons for Dell's own utilities. The dx2250 had no icons whatsoever on its desktop, other than Windows's own.
Vostro PC users have 24/7, year-round access to "dedicated small-business-trained technicians," and each machine ships with software that those techs can use to attempt fixing the PC remotely. HP says that its business-PC customers receive faster access to tech support than its home-PC customers get, and that such business customers talk to a different set of reps.
These PCs, nevertheless, aren't the best values that Dell and HP have to offer.
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