Buying the right computer hardware for my tech start-up

[mediaman]

I have been working on an internet media startup for the past year. My experience is in business development and marketing not technology. I wanted to gain some insight from other people who have or are developing a tech start up. A little about my venture the venture will have a content network of about 40 – 50 websites. Content would be hybrid blog / magazines like a techcrunch.com, and foodsense.com just to give some examples. Additional properties will be an ad marketplace website similar to buyads.com and finally an internet tv websites similar to mydamnchannel.com and/or revision3.com and an internet media production company.

Right now I am in a budgeting phase. Since the company is a lot of content development, blogging I want to know what computer systems to buy. We will use a lot of cloud services for hosting and management needs. Apple computers are to expensive for my budget. So I am considering buying staff the new Google Chromebooks. I am more concerned with programmers since I am not one I wanted to know would the Google Chromebooks be powerful enough for programmers to still do their jobs and designers to still produce quality work. I’m really trying to get the best bang for my buck. So I would like to hear what programmers and designers have to say.

Any and all advice from people is welcome!

[stevenmw]

With tat many websites focus on RAM. Buy machines or motherboards that can hold A LOT of RAM.

[sunitisood16]

As I think you can have a look on the following :-

Acer C7 Chromebook is having Low price; Good port selection; 320GB hard drive plus 100GB of cloud storage. But it has a Very short battery life; Bland and relatively thick design. Along with this, Acer's Chromebook delivers Chrome OS for a rock-bottom price, but it's sunk by short battery life and a thicker and heavier design than the competition.

[Landman]

Ensure that your PCs atleast have an i3 or i5 processor and 2-4 gigs of Ram.

You will find that having a team of bloggers and developers that each person on the team will have lots of tabs open in their browser. This can put some strain on each machine especially if there are other programs open.

[Redcoder]

Nah, I don't think that the Chromebook is going to cut it for programmers.

If portability is not that necessary, just buy a tower CPU and customize it by adding RAM, a better processor or whatever other customizations. Programming tools like Netbeans that are coded using Java have memory hogging issues due to Java's Garbage collector which offers automatic memory management and therefore need a very fast and high memory computer.

Also the right tools like Software will be crucial. You probably won't be buying software like Dreamwever if they are experienced programmers.