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Upgrading my Home Office

Max Melcher

4 minute read

Upgrading my Home Office

Given the COVID-19 situation and the flexibility I have working for Microsoft, I decided to invest a little bit in my home office and upgrade a few things here and there - I spent more than 8 hours in my home office every day, so every penny spent is a good investment, right?

Desk

As you can see in the picture above, I built a pretty big desk. If I sit to much I get terrible back pain, thats why bought a height adjustable frame (Flexispot E5) and went to the hardware store and bought a 2 meter panel. Super happy about the outcome and it really reduced my back pain.

PC Upgrade

99% of the times I work from my private PC with two screens. I have not upgraded my PC for 5 years, so I decided to buy a few new components to speed things up - looking at you Teams - and do some local development with VSCode & Docker. Right-sizing the upgrade was not easy, but I think I found a good mix:

The case, graphics card and power supply, disks and whatnot are already in place - keeping them for now. But upgrading from 4 cores to 16 cores is really really making a difference here. First time that I bought an AMD CPU instead of an Intel CPU.

The displays you can see above are Asus VG248QE 24-inch 3D LED Monitor - Black (1920x1080, 80000000:1, 144 Hz, 1ms, DVI Display Port, HDMI) - I tried one big screen and had to return it; two or three screens are my preference.

Input

The last purchase I made was a keyboard Logitech K740 wired keyboard that was recommended to me, now my muscle memory needs to be reset - typing is really hard now. But the keyboard is quiet enough so that I can type during meetings without being on mute. The keyboard is accompanied by a Logitech G500 mouse - now superseded by Logitech G502. Everything wired, I don’t want to charge mission-critical stuff.

Audio / Video

A really great investment is the Logitech Brio - the Windows Hello support is really great. I boot the computer, smile, and I am logged in. Having a good video quality in meetings is more important nowadays, too. If my wife and kid are around, then I typically switch to my headset ASTRO Gaming A50. It is super comfortable and the audio quality is just perfect. 8 hour meetings are doable with it - both the headset and the Brio work great with Teams/Webex/Hangout.

Environmental things

I am a big fan of Hue lights - the automation possibilities are really great. Therefore I bought a couple of them and added some magic to it. When someone rings the doorbell, only the lights blink - no noise that could bother me. Quite helpful when the kid sleeps, too. For some ambient lights, I bought two Hue Ambiance Light bars and turned them to the wall - with the hue sync app it is a really great experience especially during the night or when gaming! Additionally I bought an EVE Room 2 to monitor the air quality (if it decreases, one Hue light turns red) and the temperature. The runtime of this gadget with the e-ink display is like a month.

For the past couple of years I could perfectly live without a printer - but - staying at home changed this. Therefore I bought a color laser printer (HP Color Laser 179fwg). At first I thought the Wifi-integration is not needed, but I printed several times from my iPhone and that is really cool!

Closing

Lots of nice things here - some of them are gadgets and not really required - but it has to be fun, right? Anything you would recommend? Please don’t suggest a Stream Deck :)

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