Necessary equipment for home office | Articles | Gadgets, gifts and accessories

Source: onepixelu.com

Despite the grad­ual lift­ing of quar­an­tine restric­tions, many com­pa­nies are in no hur­ry to return their employ­ees back to the office. And in some com­pa­nies, they are even think­ing about leav­ing some of their employ­ees to work from home even after all restric­tions are lift­ed.

It’s no secret that for many, work­ing from home has proven to be much more dif­fi­cult than it seemed at first glance. At first, it seems that all you need to get start­ed is a good com­put­er, a reli­able print­er, and an Inter­net con­nec­tion. How­ev­er, in prac­tice, it turns out that many more things may be need­ed for effi­cient and com­fort­able work. And more impor­tant­ly, how a copy­writer or free­lance jour­nal­ist’s home office is set up may not be suit­able for a graph­ic design­er and may not be con­ve­nient for a vlog­ger at all.

What do you need to get start­ed, and what would you con­sid­er nec­es­sary? Here are some tips to help you pre­pare your home for effi­cient office work.

Workstation, productive PC or laptop

A work­sta­tion, pow­er­ful PC or lap­top will be the cen­ter of your home office. But which mod­el do you need? It depends on the nature of your work. A reli­able work­sta­tion can be crit­i­cal to high-end work, espe­cial­ly for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als. In most cas­es, you will be able to upgrade your work­sta­tion with a pow­er­ful GPU and use your own mon­i­tors that suit your needs.

Apple Mac Book Pro in a home office sys­tem. Source: kensington.com

If you’re look­ing for some­thing more aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing and mobile, you can always replace your desk­top com­put­er with a mobile work­sta­tion or pow­er­ful lap­top from a well-known man­u­fac­tur­er like Leno­vo or ASUS. And if you love Apple tech­nol­o­gy, then the Mac­Book Pro can be a uni­ver­sal option.

Quality Monitor

You can choose any mon­i­tor you want. High res­o­lu­tion, refresh rate or curved screen, but beware — some mon­i­tors are specif­i­cal­ly designed to meet the per­for­mance stan­dards for pro­fes­sion­al graph­ics work, while oth­ers are well suit­ed for gam­ing. Video edi­tors and edi­tors may have addi­tion­al dis­play require­ments.

Xiao­mi Mi Sur­face Dis­play 34”. Source: gearbest.com

If you have a graph­ics card and the extra mon­ey to buy more than one mon­i­tor, using mul­ti­ple screens will cer­tain­ly make many tasks eas­i­er and faster. Or you’ll just have more fun play­ing games.

Reliable storage system

You can choose the cheap­er and sim­pler option (buy­ing a portable hard dri­ve) or the more expen­sive and advanced one (choos­ing a NAS), but you will need reli­able stor­age any­way, because this is one of the foun­da­tions of a home office. It’s also worth think­ing about data secu­ri­ty — if you’re seri­ous about work­ing from home, you’re unlike­ly to want some­one else to be able to access your data.

SYNOLOGY DS218PLAY NAS

What is worth choos­ing? If you’re stor­ing large graph­ics files (such as RAW pho­tos or video), you’ll want a more advanced option, some­thing with RAID tech­nol­o­gy and a Thun­der­bolt 3 con­nec­tion. If all you’re stor­ing is Word doc­u­ments, you can choose a cheap­er option. portable option. WD’s MyBook line is some­where in between, you get mas­sive data stor­age, con­ve­niences like the abil­i­ty to access files from any­where and set up mail servers. To work with your Mac with­out refor­mat­ting, you should look at exter­nal dri­ves from LaC­ie and G‑Tech.

Printer and Scanner

Do you already have a com­put­er and stor­age for your work, but also need to make phys­i­cal copies of doc­u­ments, pre­sen­ta­tions, and oth­er mate­ri­als? Then you need a print­er.

How­ev­er, choos­ing a print­er can be as dif­fi­cult as buy­ing a lap­top, and will depend pri­mar­i­ly on what exact­ly you are going to print. If doc­u­ments, pre­sen­ta­tions and Excel spread­sheets, then you should pay atten­tion to a laser print­er, which will pro­vide clear­er print­ing of fonts and images. How­ev­er, they are more expen­sive and require the use of cer­tain types of paper and ton­er instead of ink (you should always con­sid­er the price of con­sum­ables when buy­ing).

HP Laser­Jet Pro M203dn

While you can buy a col­or laser print­er, you need to con­sid­er the price of ton­er car­tridges, which are more expen­sive than reg­u­lar ink car­tridges and can be quite expen­sive in the long run, espe­cial­ly if you print a lot of col­or images.

An inkjet print­er might be a more bud­get-friend­ly option, but for high-qual­i­ty, high-res­o­lu­tion inkjet print­ing, you’ll pay a lit­tle more and use more ink than a print­er.

Super-bud­get options for inkjet MFPs (mul­ti­func­tion­al device that com­bines a print­er, scan­ner and copi­er) are offered by Canon and HP. More advanced laser MFP mod­els can be found at HP. You can also pur­chase a sep­a­rate scan­ner, such as Epson Per­fec­tion V19, includ­ing a portable ver­sion.

router

It would seem that why both­er sep­a­rate­ly about a router for a home office, and why not buy the first one that comes across? The answer is sim­ple: when a router goes down, your entire home office ecosys­tem stops work­ing. Of course, this is not the kind of sce­nario you want to face when try­ing to impress a client.

In an ordi­nary apart­ment, one reli­able router, like the ASUS RT-AC68U, will be enough. Despite its ven­er­a­ble age, this work­horse is unlike­ly to let you down.

ASUS RT-AC88U. Source: thesingaporegadgettalkshow.blogspot.com

If you trans­fer large files or depend on a strong, sta­ble and reli­able sig­nal for your work, you can pay atten­tion to more advanced mod­els like the ASUS RT-AC88U, which pro­vide a max­i­mum through­put of 3167 Mbps. For larg­er rooms, you can look at expand­able Wi-Fi sys­tems with addi­tion­al points, like Google Wi-Fi.

You may also need a num­ber of addi­tion­al devices, but they can­not be called nec­es­sary.

An unin­ter­rupt­ible pow­er sup­ply (UPS) will help pro­tect your work from untime­ly volt­age fluc­tu­a­tions and pow­er out­ages. While you’ll find plen­ty of options at a wide price range, it’s safer to go for a rep­utable man­u­fac­tur­er such as APC, Cyber­Pow­er, or Pow­er­com.

There are many dif­fer­ent types of devices from sim­ple line fil­ters to UPS mod­els designed for servers. For a small home office, you need to eval­u­ate what devices you have run­ning and how long a back­up bat­tery is need­ed to safe­ly shut down the com­put­er in the event of a pow­er loss (usu­al­ly ten min­utes). In gen­er­al, for most every­day tasks, a device like the Pow­er­com Rap­tor RPT-2000AP or a sim­i­lar mod­el should suf­fice.

Smart devices with a voice assis­tant, like the Ama­zon Echo, can help you find some­thing on the Inter­net or play music with­out being dis­tract­ed from work. If you already have devices of the Smart Home sys­tem, then with the help of a voice assis­tant you can adjust the light­ing and con­trol house­hold appli­ances with­out leav­ing your desk­top.

Google Pix­el 4 XL. Source: itpro.co.uk

And, of course, today it is hard­ly pos­si­ble to imag­ine work­ing with­out a smart­phone. A qual­i­ty smart­phone with a good speak­er and a pow­er­ful proces­sor can be a great tool to com­ple­ment the rest of the devices we talked about above.

There are many more things and sup­plies you may need to set up a home office, but the basic set of equip­ment described in this arti­cle will be a good start.