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Typical Equipment for the Home Office
- Your Carleton Laptop
NOTE: If you work with sensitive data, you must use a Carleton-managed computer or petition for an exception to that policy.
- Laptop Stand
- External Monitor
- External Keyboard
- Mouse
- Good network connectivity
- Possibly a printer
Equipment Recommendations
Here is a list of the equipment that ITS typically deploys to Carleton offices and workspaces. If you are looking for equipment for your home office, that list will provide a good starting place.
For a number of people, the largest hurdle to working from a laptop is the size of the screen. Carleton buys laptops with 13” screens and that’s simply not a lot of space to display the number of windows we typically want to be able to see at once. Purchasing a good external monitor can greatly improve your hybrid or remote work experience.
Carleton typically purchases Dell Ultrasharp monitors, specifically the Ultrasharp U2419H. These are 24” monitors with very little visible bezel (the plastic bits that run around the outside of the screen area), good brightness, good color representation, and a crisp visual display. However, you may have issues finding these monitors in stock due to the current global supply chain issues.
When purchasing a monitor, the three biggest things to consider are the brightness level, the resolution, and the types of connectors it has.
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ITS looks for a brightness level of at least 200-250 “nits,” which is a unit of brightness measure (specifically, a nit is roughly the amount of light per square meter that an average candle produces; what is an “average candle” is left as an exercise for the reader).
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For 24” monitors, we look for a resolution of at least 1920x1080 (Full HD). Generally, as the screen size increases, you want the resolution to also increase; for a 27” monitor, we recommend a resolution of 2560x1440. Higher resolution basically means each individual pixel is smaller, which results in crisper-looking text.
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Monitors connect via a number of different types of connections, and you can generally use adapters to get from one kind of connection to another. We recommend getting a monitor that has an HDMI connection; that’s one that looks like this:
Image from Wikimedia Commons