The best financial advice that can be offered in any ecomonic climate is this: make your money work for you instead of you working for your money. Of course, making that work in real life is always a significant challenge. Using all the resources you possess can indeed be tricky--especially if you are not totally aware of the resources available to you.

Gateway Computers had an interesting problem with their resources. Sitting around their 272 retail stores were nearly 8,000 demonstration PCs, all running Windows something-or-other, churning away screensavers until a potential customer came along and test-drove the machine. But, in between all of those little point-and-click sessions, these machines were essentially doing nothing.

Having 8,000 computers sitting around doing nothing is a lot of overhead, both fiscally and computationally. All of these machines are top-of-the line (all the better for demos) and networked together into a company-wide WAN. But other than putting out heat, what could be done with these idle PCs?

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