At present I am working in the Middle East and out here the houses usually have large rooms, and so I am lucky enough to have a home office that is really quite spacious. However back in the UK my home is significantly smaller, with associated smaller room sizes. My house is quite old, but in newer houses the rooms are often even smaller and often don’t have storage built in. This means that the space that you might have in which to set up a desk or home office is often not exactly palatial. When I was based in the UK my home office was actually in the “box room” and once you had the desk in there, with a chair, a few shelves and a filing cabinet there really wasn’t much room for much else.

At this point you really don’t want to have to add in a large desktop computer and monitor. A few years ago I had a large desktop computer under the desk, which was awkward and got in the way of my feet, and a huge (it seems today) 19” CRT monitor that really took up all the desk real estate.

What I really needed was a computing system with a much smaller footprint. This basically has two aspects the computer itself and the monitor. For the computer, one way of achieving a lower footprint is to buy a laptop, which is probably becoming the more common method these days and one which allows you to take your computer with you. This is the approach I use. I have a docking station at the office and at home. Another is to get a small footprint computer such as the Acer Aspire L100 Small Form Factor Desktop or even something like the Apple Mini. The first of which will also provide you with a relatively easy upgrade capability. These will have minimal impact on the desktop and real estate and may even be able to sit on the shelf. If you still have a CRT monitor then the move to an LCD screen such as the really is a no brainer, giving you back your desk, as even quite large screens will have a very low footprint.

An alternative to the above choices is to go for some of the really attractive looking “all in one” computers such as the Apple iMac or the Sony Vaio VGC-LM1M. One thing for sure is that a lack of space these days should not mean you have to compromise on your computer.