£500 office

Building your own for £500.

Can you equip a whole office for £500?

I decided to find out for my self. The first thing that I needed was a PC connected to the internet. I already had broadband and a router but I checked e-bay and routers can be picked up for £30 without too much of a problem. The PC itself was going to be interesting as I need web access and a full suite of office programs.

Once agian e-bay came to my rescue although there are a number of specialised second hand dealers that you can also look at. I purchased a 1 GHz IBM Thinkpad laptop for £180. It arrived within 48 hours and was in extremely good condition. However there was no operating system and no software.

With only £500 to spend I couldn't afford to buy Windows XP. I decided on Linux and I chose the Ubuntu distribution. Within half and hour I had my new laptop up and running Linux and communicating with my wireless router all for no additional cost. I had a full office suite from OpenOffice.org, my web browser was Firefox and my e-mail came courtesy of Thunderbird - total cost for software = Zero.

It was now time to find a printer, I really wanted a multi function device which had a built in scanner and fax machine. As I was using Linux I needed one with excellent Linux support and everything pointed to HP. I eventually found just what I was looking for at £40 minus ink. A quick trip to town and I had my cheap ink for £10.

Back to e-bay, I found a cheap port replicator for the laptop at £20. I now had all of my IT equipment.

I picked up an office chair at an Office Supplies reseller for £40 and a very good desk from Ikea for £11.99.

I was extremely surprised at how easy it was to fully equip an office so cheaply. In fact for less money than most people spend on a PC!! I had money to spare so I decided to splash out on a TFT flatscreen monitor and an external DVD writer to back up my files - all for my original budget of £500.

If you want any help or would like to share your experiences please drop us a message at the forum and we will be more than happy to give advice on how we achieved this.