Internet Cafe design

[calvarygeorge]

Would like advise on setting up an Internet Cafe... from hardware to
software needed...
For example: how can I control the time a person is surfing in the
event the person pays per hour usage... should I order DSL versus a T-1
circuit... what is the best way to block access to offensive content...
what would I need to set up a good game room...

What is the difference between using a router or a switch, do I need
both?

Thanks for your input

 

[Andrew]

Hardware - Probably as cheap as you could get. one tip!
No Speakers, try to get headphones and preferably nice ones too but try
not to get the top of the line they wear out very quickly.
Mice and keyboards are going need to be very durable. Get one's you can
really pound on!
Video and Memory a good choice for a machine in a cafe will probably
have 500mb of ram and a 128mb video card. that way you'll get decent
fps on the games.

Software - XP is going to be expensive but then a lot of the newer
games might not run on windows95.

Internet Connection;

DSL is great for Downloading lot of stuff but if you get people playing
games and stuff you need a pipe with equal bandwidth both us and down a
T1 would probably provide that.

You are definitely going to need a router or some kind of routing
device (another computer perhaps) if you do use another computer you
can install a proxy server to help filter out the internet stuff. As
for offensive content unf I don't know of anything that could filter it
all out.

As for a switch you will probably need only 1 and only if you have more
that 50 computers, other wise hubs do the same job just as well.

 

[xubomber]

Actually, for newer games you might need to have more than 512mb o
ram, although of course having 1gb of ram per computer can get ver
expensive very fast
I agree with Andrew on the speakers, mice, and keyboards. Publi
keyboards and mice take a ton of abuse
Win2k might be good for an OS, less expensive than XP and still work
decently for newer games (I think)
As for time control, I think there are commercial programs out ther
that can automatically log off of the computer once a certain amoun
of time is up. Not sure, but worth looking into
Finally, it's a good idea to make sure that the computers you get ca
be upgraded fairly painlessly, so that you can keep up with curren
technology without having to pay too hefty a price every few years
CPU clock speed isn't terribly important, very few programs or game
should ever manage to make the CPU the bottleneck in performance