[saravanakumar]

I’m starting café in my location. I need a computer for billing and accounting purpose.

I have the following options from http://www.bigapple-india.com (Used Computers) -monitors to be bought seperately at Rs.2200/-

IBM / Compaq / HP / Dell , Pentium II - 266 Mhz

512 kb cache in CPU
64 mb ram,
3.2 GB hdd,
1.44 fdd,
AGP / high end VGA,
Desktop / mini tower cabinet and SMPS,
USB, Serial, parallel and other ports,
Keyboard, mouse.

Price - Rs.2,699/-.


IBM / Compaq / HP / Dell , Pentium II - 300 & 333 Mhz

512 kb cache in CPU
64 mb ram,
3.2 GB hdd,
1.44 fdd,
AGP / high end VGA,
Desktop / mini tower cabinet and SMPS,
USB, Serial, parallel and other ports,
Keyboard, mouse.


Price - Rs.3,199/-.


IBM / Compaq / HP / Dell , Pentium II - 350 & 366 (Celeron) Mhz

512 & 128 kb cache in CPU
64 mb ram,
4.3 GB hdd,
1.44 fdd,
AGP / high end VGA,
Desktop / mini tower cabinet and SMPS,
USB, Serial, parallel and other ports,
Keyboard, mouse.


Price - Rs.3,399/-.
IBM / Compaq / HP / Dell , Pentium II - 400 & 433 (Celeron) Mhz

512 & 128 kb cache in CPU
128 mb ram,
4.3 GB hdd,
1.44 fdd,
AGP / high end VGA,
Desktop / mini tower cabinet and SMPS,
USB, Serial, parallel and other ports,
Keyboard, mouse.

Price - Rs.3,899/-.


IBM / Compaq / HP / Dell , Pentium II - 450 Mhz

512 & 128 kb cache in CPU
128 mb ram,
6.2 GB hdd,
1.44 fdd,
AGP / high end VGA,
Desktop / mini tower cabinet and SMPS,
USB, Serial, parallel and other ports,
Keyboard, mouse.

Price - Rs.4,299/-.

The same company offers a new computer with the following configuration

14-inch colour monitor contains the following features
Celeron300 1 Ghz processor,
810E motherboard,
64 MB RAM,
10GB hard disk drive,
56 Kbps Modem with LAN card,
sound card and in-built stereo speakers with mike
3 USB ports
keyboard that has a touch-pad mouse
a free Intel phone for Internet communication
one-year warranty.

Price- Rs. 6995/-


Please assist me in choosing a optimal configuration with cost factor in mind, that can run accounting / billing software and a media player for playing music efficiently.

Please give me some information on the free/shareware accounting / billing softwares available for café billing purpose.

Thanks for any help.
Saravana Kumar

[macdude425]

Last would probably be the best option.
If you want a good business management and billing software suite, get LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP & Perl & Python) and use this:
http://www.citrusdb.org/

[Nitestick]

agreed. if you wish to use it for media (you only mention music but you may wish to use it for video as well) only the last one actually has enough power to play most videos.

[saravanakumar]

I would play only audio songs and not video songs.

And Could someone tell me some good freeware / shareware accounting / billing softwares for windows platform.

Thnks macdude425 and nitestick for your replies.

[macdude425]

As far as I know, there aren't any really good ones for free. Either you use Windows and pay for a good set of apps, or suck it up and use Linux, which would end up costing less.

If you would seriously tell me you would PAY because you were lazy, that's very sad...