Gateway emphasizes easy-to-fix PCs for SMB
Company is emphasizing features such as tool-free chassis designs
Follow @infoworldA new series of low-cost desktops and notebooks from Gateway are designed to allow small-business customers to deploy PCs without having to rely on a professional IT department, the company announced Thursday in a press release.
Gateway's latest PCs are designed for small and medium-size businesses, generally thought of as companies with anywhere from ten to a few hundred employees. After IT departments at large corporations began to exercise IT spending discipline following the dot-com collapse in the early part of the decade, PC and server companies have sought to gain a foothold among SMB customers.
SMBs make up a very large part of the total market for PCs and servers, but their individual purchasing pales next to the IT departments at the world's largest companies. However, the unique needs of these customers for simple PCs that are easy to maintain and acquire are receiving new attention from PC companies desperate to find sources of growth in a stagnating market.
For example, small law firms and medical offices typically don't have dedicated IT personnel, relying instead on PC-savvy employees or local PC distributors to troubleshoot problems and roll out new systems. Therefore Gateway, along with most of the PC industry, is emphasizing features such as tool-free chassis designs and cooling technologies designed to prolong the useful life of its new PCs.
The S-Series desktops use the BTX (Balanced Technology Extended) motherboard design, which arranges components such as the processor and memory in order to generate maximum airflow. Intel Corp.'s latest Pentium 4 and Celeron chips used in Gateway's S-Series desktops generate more heat than previous chips, but the BTX design helps keep the PC cool with two fans that direct a steady stream of air over the processor and motherboard.
Gateway's S-Series notebooks use the same components, such as batteries or power adapters, across all notebooks in the product line, the company said. This allows SMBs to stockpile one type of component with the assurance it will work on any of the notebooks in the product line, Gateway said.
The new systems are available in several configurations on Gateway's Web site Thursday. For example, the S-5000S desktop costs US$449 with Intel's Celeron D 331 processor, 256M bytes of DDR2(double data rate 2) SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), a 40G-byte hard drive, and a CD-RW drive. On the notebook side, the S-7200N costs $849 with Intel's Celeron M 360 processor, 512M bytes of DDR2 SDRAM, a 40G-byte hard drive, and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive.
