Working from home laptop set up

Working a few days from home is becoming more common but we don’t all have (or want) studies and specialised desks to work from. A lot of us just work off the most convenient table. Unfortunately working for long periods on your laptop is not ideal and it’s important that you get up and stretch regularly, particularly your neck and shoulders.

Ideally raise your laptop screen and plugin a keyboard and ,mouse so you can work without hunching forward. You want your screen at eye level and your forearms level with the table. You may need to fiddle with a few different boxes to get the screen height right. Try different chairs to get your arms right. Gas lift chairs are great but you may not want it living semi permanently in your kitchen or lounge room and they damage your carpet over time. If you have a little bit of spare space and a few dollars you could try a compact mobile computer desk that you can wheel out when you need it.

You can also plug a second monitor into your laptop. This video shows you how to set it up on Windows.

Techy places (like Jaycar) have a range of adapters to connect your old DVI, VGA or DisplayPort monitor to your laptop HDMI port (don’t worry if you don’t know what they are, just take a picture of the sockets on your monitor to show them).