My right hand has been inflamed for six months.

Why? From the contortations my poor hand was making on the laptop mouse pad, and reaching for the navigation and control keys bunched together on the right side of the keyboard.

It is surprisingly easy to upgrade your work station and the benefits are well worth the trouble.

Am now writing this on a full sized keyboard, with a regular mouse at hand.

Have put my laptop on a wire stand, for better air flow to keep it cool, and for viewing the monitor at eye level. Helps to improve my posture for dancing.

Plugged in a second, external monitor that I had sitting around. Nice to see two full sized windows at once.

Added a semi-permanent, external hard drive and moved all my media files off the laptop drive. Cleaned up the laptop drive and registry, and now my computer boots and runs much faster.

For as much as you and your employees use computers, anything you can do to make your work station more comfortable has to be worth it.

Some upgrades for laptops:
- USB hub to give you more USB ports
- Full-sized keyboard
- Full-sized mouse with scroll wheel
- Raise the height of your laptop
- Second, external monitor
- Semi-permanent harddrive for media files
- Second external harddrive for backup of everything onsite
- Third external harddrive for offsite backup
- Fourth external harddrive for offsite backup rotation. Cannot have enough backup.

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg