If your home is your castle then the home office is the treasury, the library and the communications centre. Whether as a student, telecommuter, independent home business owner or just someone taking care of the day-to-day administration of life, a well-equipped home office goes a long way to boosting productivity, helping us to stay organized and on top of things.
There are a few central components to building the best SOHO (small office, home office) setup. Following are some of the important product categories and a few product recommendations to go with.

The throne:
You could easily go out and spend $500 or more on a top-of-the-line office chair from the likes of Steelcase or Humanscale and your butt would be cradled in the ultimate comfort, your lumbar region supported and your chair infinitely adjustable. For many people however, that price tag is way too heavy to justify. As Gord Goble pointed out in his March 2008 “Essential Home Office Furniture” article (www.hubcanada.com/index.php/ggoble), there are many excellent options at the $300 and below level, like Ikea’s Joakim. The important thing is to get as much butt time with the chair as is humanly possible before committing to purchase. While you may feel a little weird sitting on the demo chairs at your local outlet for an hour, it’s worth doing; you’ll be spending a lot more time in it than that when you get it home so it’s important you find the right fit for you and your posterior.

The brains:
Choosing the right computer for your home office can be a daunting task. Once the initial, relatively simple questions are dealt with (Mac or PC, desktop or laptop and the ever important “What’s my budget?”) the real fun begins. To a large degree, your choices will be narrowed down by your budget. As a general rule of thumb though, in the days of Windows Vista pre-installed on the overwhelming majority of PCs you’ll see at retail, opt for more RAM (2GB as a defacto minimum) and a Core 2 Duo processor.
If you’ve decided that a spiffy new laptop is in order, check out Marc Saltzman’s article elsewhere on the site for some laptop best-buys and purchasing tips.

The network:
You have to have some kind of network in the house and if we’re acquiring new technology, we might as well get the latest. To that end, consider the Linksys Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link (WRT600N-CA, $190, www.linksys.com) offering 802.11n wireless for up to 12x the speed and 4x the range of earlier wireless standards. It, like many newer routers, has enhanced security protocols to replace the older and more easily cracked standards. The Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link, as the name implies, can also share a USB storage device over the network; a USB flash drive, USB hard drive or similar.

Next: The storage

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