I really need a professional opinion...

[Tray6996]

I'm thinking about opening my own network systems repair and maint. business. I ave a few quetions...

1. Can someone tell me what the most popular NOS's would be? we're talking small business, maybe some medium-sized corps. (nothing with a network warranting a full time Admin).

2.Where could I recruit techs in my community to do the service calls? Sounds like a stupid question, but I never like to overlook any obvious details. I'm in Indianapolis, which carries a large downtown University and many others within 60 miles. (Am I thinking correctly by shopping the college campus? Or would the average computer science major not be knowledgeable enough to handle the load?)


Tray6996

~always keep a sledgehammer in your computer toolbox...you never know when you'll need it~

 

[igiveup]

Most popular? Well, NT 4.0 is my best guess. There are a lot of organizations out there that just don't want to migrate to a Win2000 environment. I would say *nix and their variants, but you did say that the office wouldn't have a full time admin on staff. As far as the small business go you will find a lot more win 98 machines filling in for server duties. I am talking about offices of 20 or fewer users.

*nix variants are more common when you get into medium sized businesses of 50 or more, as well as finding NT & 2K boxes, simply because filesharing in a peer-to-peer setup doesn't work so well at these levels . Seriously, NT, 98, & 2000. Most people don't know enough about *nix and it scares em away from using it.

 

[Asubit]

Small business server 4.5 and small business server 2000

read up!

 

[Tray6996]

do you think win2000 and/ XP will see thier way into those environments in the near future?

 

[Asubit]

Most definitely. Primarily because any upgrade will more than likely consist of the win2k platform if they are currently running NT. The only possible reason for holding back they may have is their current personal support isn't qualified or experienced with anything beyond NT.

The differences between 2k and NT is light and day.. 2k is what NT should have been.

Since you are dealing with smaller businesses I would more than recommend getting familiar with the small business environments like small business server 4.5 (nt based) and sbs 2000 (win2k based). These are very popular with networks under 50 local active clients for both price, performance and overall value.

 

[Tray6996]

thx, Asubit.


Tray6996