A lot of our clients are small insurance companies. Since most of them know insurance and not computers, we are calle din to help them in that area. One of the major players in the office-support software arena for small insurance companies seems to have no problem getting these companies to spring for a fairly beefy NT Server which also runs SQL Server to run their app. We've managed to get allt he ones with more than one physical office to also invest in a seperate Citrix MetaFrame server to access the app from the remote office. Where there's a genuine benefit, it's not so difficult to convince a client to spend money, and I have no problem doing so. I would never make a salesman though, I can't justify telling someone to buy a bunch of hardware and software they don't really need. But if you're reaching the limits (10 connections) of peer to peer networking, than going to client-server is NOT a frivilous expediture, but a business necessity. A small server that does nothing but share a drive is every bit as 'set it and forget it' as trying to use one of the workstations as the main peer station, probably MORE reliable in the long run. They certainly don't need to hire an administrator, and you don;t need the super duper top of the line CPU in the server, for a small office. If you can find one, a Pentium-II system with 256MB RAM would be plenty. P3-700+ is overkill for a small network, for equal costs I'd rather have 256MB RAM and the slower CPU than 128MB RAM and the faster CPU.
I'd consider my house/home office a small network - my P2-350MHz server with 384MB RAM is as rock solid as they come, and it's not even a 'real' server. Months without reboots, and it also runs SQL Server for experimental purposes. In the long run, your client will be much better off with a server. They will get better performance and rliablity, savign them money. You will get a better environment for your applicaiton, saving you time and headaches, again saving your client money.


Randy