Gigabit not necessary - my customer wouldn't appreciate the subtlety of the benefits + the switch would increase in cost quite drastically - £400-£700 instead of around £110 (for a 24 port) + with just 2-3 PCs possibly on-line at the same time it's a bit OTT in this case.
TCS
Re my half-price claim - it was badly written - I meant that the data-sharing requirement will end up costing the customer half the price of a server+OS+Monitor+keyboard+mouse versus the simple File Server option.
Based on price on
www.techomatic.co.uk and
www.insight.com/uk the file server options do vary in price considerably (these figures include VAT, Richard and other US based reader should replace GBP with USD!)
Snap 250GB is 681GBP, LaCie is 457GBP
Snap
80GB is 508GBP, Lacie
160GB is 385GBP (snap don't do 160GB model)
How will her files be backed up?
Probably will rent some backup space offsite and have the main PC run a backup job every so often.
Cheers
Charles