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Making the transition from a desktop to a laptop should be easy, but many people struggle to take that step.

Those who love their desktop point to the ease with which it is ready for use; you just press the "on" button, wait a minute and there it is, ready to use. You have a nice comfy chair at your desk, at the right height for you, and a proper keyboard where you can rest your wrists and so type more efficiently and in a better posture. You have a nice big clear monitor on your desk, you have a proper mouse, and a ready-to-use level surface on which to put any documents you may wish to work on. Your printer is wired up, plugged in and ready to go, and the broadband connection is always there and always on. Right?

Well all that's true, but the good news is that you can have all the comforts of your desktop, on a laptop, and all the advantages of portability together with all the advantages of a set up on your desk designed and ready for you. How? Here's how....

Firstly you can easily and relatively inexpensively buy a laptop nowadays which has a processor equivalent to a desktop, so you will experience no loss of power or speed.

Secondly you can buy a docking system for your laptop, which will enable you to use it at your desk, exactly as you used to use your desktop. For those of you who have not used one before, what a docking system does is connect to all the peripherals on your desk. So you plug it in using its plug/adapter and you can connect a mouse, a keyboard, a monitor and a printer to it using USBs.

Because it sits permanently on your desk, all your peripherals remain plugged into it. When you arrive with your laptop you just put it in the slot and click. You laptop is now connected to all your peripherals. It also acts as a power source and charger so you don't even need to get your laptop's cable out. I leave my cable at home, and have my docking station on my desk at work, so when I go home at night I just press the button to disengage the laptop and pop it in my bag. That's it!

It is fantastic to have all the convenience of my own laptop on my desk, with everything I need on it, but be able to access it using a full sized keyboard and a separate mouse, and use a nice big monitor (mine is 20 inches). A docking system gives you full port replication, is about as wide as a laptop and weighs a couple of pounds I'd say. They are easy to install and should be trouble free. Someone else with a compatible laptop could even plug into it if you wanted to operate a hot desk with it.

This means you can still work at your comfortable desk, but at the end of the day you can take your laptop to the Internet coffee shop if you want a change of scenery or a shot of caffeine while you work, or take work home at the press of a button - no need to email home to yourself the document you are working on, or whatever, and you never need to worry about which computer has the latest saved version of something on it, because you'll always have it on your laptop.

This is win-win situation; you will only gain if you make the transition from desktop to laptop in this way, and oh how convenient it is even at work to just undock your lapop at the press of a button to show a collegue what you are doing, without them having to crouch down, come around to your side of your desk and squint at your monitor. Instead you can just hand them the laptop, they can have a look at whatever it is, they give it back to you and with one click it is back in its dock again. Perfect! What are you waiting for?

Learn more about this author, Anne Davey.
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