While energy efficiency is important to home users, it's vital to the owners of small or medium-sized businesses. Electricity is a major expense these days, and with rising oil prices, the cost of electricity is sure to rise in the future. Buying an energy-efficient desktop is the first step for the owner of a new or expanding business. If your current PCs are too slow to support your business, the latest crop of energy-efficient desktops should be on your shopping list.

Look for buzzwords like EPEAT and Energy Star 4.0. Both are standards that point you to systems that have been certified as environmentally friendly and energy efficient. PCs like the power-sipping Apple Mac mini use very little juice compared with the behemoths that people bought only a few years ago. In fact, these systems use less power when idle than the incandescent work lights on many desks.

We looked at a couple of configurations for this story: the small-form-factor PC (the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Desktop and Lenovo ThinkCentre a61e) and the tower PC (the Dell OptiPlex 755). All three of these business-oriented Windows systems are available in multiple chassis configurations, but use the same internals (CPUs, motherboards, on-board graphics). This enables you to use the same software on the towers as you do on the small desktops. This makes sense for medium-size businesses. Most clerical workers can use small-form-factor PCs while specialized workers like the art department or desktop-publishing specialists may need towers that support discrete graphics cards or other PCIe expansion cards.

Don't leave out the Mac. On a functionality-per-cubic-foot basis, the Mac mini is one of the most efficient systems we've ever reviewed. It uses only as much power as a toy lamp, is both Mac OS and Windows XP/Vista compatible, and takes up very little space on a desk.

Whether your company is growing or just starting, equipping it with energy-efficient PCs makes great business sense. Today's power-saving desktops not only can do wonders for your electric bill, but they have the oomph to get the job done right.

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Featured in this Roundup:

Apple Mac mini (2GHz Core 2 Duo) ($799 direct)
With a small bump in memory and CPU speed, this quintessential small-form-factor desktop computer is still a leader among energy-efficient systems.

Dell OptiPlex 755 ($1,183 direct)
The OptiPlex 755 is not the most exciting PC on the market, but like others in this segment it proves that you can have both power and energy efficiency. Think of it as the Toyota Highlander hybrid SUV of green PCs.

HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-Slim Desktop
($1,206 direct, $1,470 with 19-inch widescreen LCD monitor)
This PC will work for businesses large and small because it can be configured for energy efficiency, helping your company's bottom line.

Lenovo ThinkCentre a61e ($659 direct)
This compact desktop PC from Lenovo shows that you can have energy efficiency as well as an easy-to-live-with business PC, making it a good choice for your mainline workers.

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