To Dedicate, or Not to Dedicate: That Is the Question

One of the most basic questions that a network plan must answer is whether the network will have one or more dedicated servers or whether it will rely completely on peer-to-peer networking, with no single computer acting as a dedicated server. If the only reason for purchasing your network is to share a printer and exchange an occasional file, you may not need a dedicated server computer. In that case, you can create a peer-to-peer network by using the computers you already have. However, all but the smallest networks benefit from having a separate, dedicated server computer.

Here are a few points to ponder regarding dedicated versus nondedicated servers:

• Using a dedicated server computer makes the network faster, easier to work with, and more reliable. Consider what happens when the user of a server computer, which doubles as a workstation, decides to turn off the computer, not realizing that someone else is accessing files on her hard drive.

• You don't necessarily have to use your biggest and fastest computer as your server computer. I've seen networks where the slowest computer on the network is the server. This is especially true when the server is mostly used to share a printer or to store a small number of shared files. If you need to buy a computer for your network, consider promoting one of your older computers to be the server and using the new computer as a client.