New Desk Setup

I have been working from my home for over 2 years now, since I moved from New Jersey to North Carolina. While I lived in NJ I was able to work from home but I wasn’t set up for it. I didn’t have a home office, I would work from my dining table which was open to the front room and the kitchen. With kids, TVs, cooking etc, this was a, to put it nicely, sub-optimal experience.

When I moved to Charlotte I was going to be working from home by default so I wanted to make sure I was setup for it this time. We bought a house in South Charlotte and I made sure it had a real office room I could put a real desk in. I also got 1GB fiber optic internet, and some monitors to increase my virtual desktop space a little. One thing I also decided to do, because I like to use them problem solving, was to get myself a nice big whiteboard in my new home office.

The difference was night and day! I had improved everything from my previous situation and I couldn’t be happier. I have been working this way for the last 2 years now and it’s generally been ok. However, recently I’ve started to feel less satisfied. My monitors weren’t at the right height and I felt a little hunch backed, I started to have probems with my webcam (the FaceTime HD drivers in BootCamp apparently aren’t a high priority for Apple). and I started to feel like I should be doing better.

Then a few weeks ago, Scott Hanselman put up a new blog post that showed the setup he has at home to make sure that his working from home doesn’t negatively impact his work and relationships and Microsoft. That post was the impetus I needed to start looking at upgrading what I was doing.

I decided to set about getting my problems fixed with my home setup, and I ordered some things to make life better. I got monitor mounts to raise my screens to a more comfortable position. I got a new microphone to improve the sound quality for my on Teams calls, and recording videos and presentations. I also got some equipment to turn my DSLR camera (a Canon T5i) into a webcam. I got a power strip with 16 outlets and a powered USB3.0 hub with 16 USB ports too.

I am in a much better position now and I think, for me, it was worth the money. I put together a YouTube video that shows the before and after and what I have. I intend to put a few more together to more in depth review the things that I bought and how they work.

This year I also plan to start putting more public facing content on this blog and my YouTube channel, which was a secondary purpose to the upgrades.

This is the finished product at the end of my initial setup.