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The contract to sell my business was signed today. The buyer takes over on January 1st. I finish the bookkeeping and tax returns dealing with 2018. Did someone say "PARTY".

First, never buy the "Home" or "Home Premium" version of Windows, always buy the Professional version, which is optimized for business usage. Myself, I have always purchased a Dell Optiplex from the Dell website during one of their promotions, paying about 40 % less than what you are considering. I am a one person office also and I find 8 Gig of Ram and a 256 GB Hard Drive comfortably adequate.

That's interesting. Overnight I was thinking about changing settings to a single monitor, just to see if that made any difference. That would seemingly narrow the problem down to the video card, wouldn't it?

I had the same problem with a Dell XPS, I was using dual monitors and the video card finally went out, but it only affected one monitor, I am the awkward person with two monitors but only uses one of them.

You could check to see if there's an updated driver available for your hardware, and be sure to make a restore point beforehand in case something goes wrong and you want to roll back to the earlier driver.

Thanks for the advice and suggestions. I decided to take it over to a computer guy I've used a couple of times before when I needed work on my MacBook Pro. After we talked about the various possibilities, he offered to sell me a refurbished unit he had in his shop. It's a Lenovo Think Center Core i5, 16 GB Ram, 240 GBSSD, graphics card for 3 monitors, and Vipre Life Anti-Virus. He cloned my existing Hard drive over to the new one, plus he upgraded MS Office for me. So after a wait of about 4 hours or so, I brought the setup back to my office, plugged it in, and am back up & running. Total cost was $590. I still have the original Hard Drive and a SATA/IDE self-powered cable, so if it turns out anything is missing I can (hopefully) pull ot off the original HD. Glad to get this done before tax filing season rolls around.

+1 on 512GB or greater SSD drive it's worth the extra money

You will NEVER regret getting the most RAM you can. We have a RAM-intensive business. Tax program, QuickBooks, Excel, browser windows for research, Adobe for pdf's, and more. It's easy to add an external hard drive; harder to add more RAM if you're nervous about opening the case, getting a grounding strap, and mucking about with adding/swapping memory modules. And always get Professional version software. I agree with cbslee; give Dell a call (they always have promotions going on) and see what you can get from them. Direct from Dell you can also get three years of next-day on-site support should something go wrong. Alternatively you can call HP and see what deal they'll give you. Good luck!

That's what I thought. There are a few office assets, too, but personal now. One client will be very, very unhappy but I've been warning her for a couple of years as the local return was going to stop allowing the offset anyway. A professor had several thousand in travel expenses for research and foreign lectures encouraged by the university but not supported. At least they have been warned and will have to try harder with the employers. Thanks for confirming.

It just converts to personal use. If and when the house is sold, then the accumulated depreciation is deducted from the Sec 121 allowance, which in some cases won't make any difference.

If you are doing the full 990, then Part XI on page 12 is the reconciliation. Line 8 or Line 9 would be the place to put changes to beginning balances that are necessary to reconcile the books, and then they would be explained in Schedule O. I suspect that if the change is relatively minor, you could get away with changing the beginning balances but I would do it this way so there is a record that it did not reconcile and you are adjusting it, with an explanation if you have one.