Hi, I've been planning on opening an Internet Cafe near-by and was wondering, should the OS be Windows 7?, just wondering on people's views please. Thank You
well you wouldn't use vista would you,vista was a dud, that's why they apologized for it and bought out win 7,and if you use xp your customers would think you were behind the times,not very progressive.i f you are just opening it ,i think your customers would naturally presume that they would be using win 7.
Thanks for the replies, if you were going into my Internet Cafe what would you expect? what prices would you say is reasonable? Thank You
Well I'm not familiar with common prices of internet cafes, maybe 7€ per hour?? no seriously I don't know.
Before i had the net, i went to a cafe down the road and paid £2 for two hours, though they were running XP SP2.
What are you using for your metering/management software? Are you restoring the disk image for each user? Get the OS that works with the above. Really, users don't really care what the OS is, as long as they can WOW, chat, Skype, email, IM, browse, etc etc
I have been Googling, but cannot seem to find a good one. I have been thinking of offering user accounts, might help keep people coming back? What OS would you recommend?
I'd use Linux for the back end, ie file server. Linux would be great for the workstations ONLY if there was no gaming, it's easier to lock down and you don't have to worry about virues and such. I would go with whatever's OS is the cheapest. And if you're offering User Accounts. You need to set up their disk space on the SERVER, that way, they can use any computer to access their files. There was a really popular internet cafe here, but the police came and shut them down. They had a very large shared hard disk space, and people downloaded all the pirated stuff to that. So all you had to pop in with blank DVD's or usb drive and leech away. Might work if your local laws are lax enough.
Do people go to Internet Cafe's to play games? I thought it was just to browse the web and check emails?
I can't imagine that internet cafes are a good investment as home internet is coming in everywhere and it would be cheaper. For those on the move wifi is also increasingly available - McDonadls for example ( naturally picking the least dangerous item from the menu or indeed trying to pick up their signal on the pavement outside!)
You will certainly need something like Deep Freeze or Drive Vaccine. These programs allow what appears to be completely normal use of a PC but any changes made to the hard drive are never permanently written so that the system is completely restored upon reboot. Prevent unauthorised changes including malware - a must have for your proposed business.
i'm running internet cafe at my house.. n i recommend u to stick with xp sp3.. coz most of the softwares, particularly for ur operator's pc, cannot run smoothly on windows 7.. i'm using acronis true image to clone each of pc.. (so u dont have to install each of them) n i'm using cafestation as billing software.. really neat, n organize if u sell or service other things.. (like softdrink, printing, scanning, whatever u can sell to ur customers) n deepfreeze is a must trust me.. ur admin, (or u), will get headache, reinstalling each of them if something bad happened. any other question, just pm me.. other thought: if u really can afford legit windows 7 for all the pcs, u have to make sure (if u want to use a pc router; like mikrotik) the pc router works with windows 7.. but.. if u plan to mod each of ur pc's bios to slic 2.1, like we learned here.. i really2 dont recommend u to do that.. somehow.. CMIIW.., modded bios with a real slic 2.1 bios is not the same after sometime.. the real slic 2.1 bios much stable.. it's just a theory based on my experience.. n, if u're planning to use loader, be prepared to maintenance all of it, once m'soft know how to disable/detect it.. sorry for my english.. thx.
I advice u to buy a MSDN subscription 350$ and u have 10 license of each edition with 10 activation for each