Whether you’re counting the days until you can return to the office or your hoping you can work from home forever, you’ve spent more than enough time working on your home computer by now to know whether it’s up to the task. If you’re starting to realize that it’s not, let us recommend some alternatives from Dell, HP and Lenovo that pack all the power you need for long-term work-related use.
Daily Workhorses
At a minimum, the computer you use for work should meet these specifications:
- Windows 10 Professional
- Intel i5 processor
- 256 GB solid state hard drive (SSD)
- 8 GB memory
We recommend these models for reliability at a reasonable price point:
- Dell Latitude 7410 ($1,519)
- HP Zbook Firefly 14 G7 ($1,649)
- Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 ($1,249.99)
High Performance
If you need more power, look for a computer that meets these specifications:
- Windows 10 Professional
- Intel i7 processor
- 512 GB solid state hard drive (SSD)
- 16 GB memory
These are our recommendations for higher performance models:
- Dell Latitude 7410 ($2,189)
- HP HP Zbook Firefly 14 G7 ($1,819)
- Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 ($2,027.40)
Do you recommend any lower-end PCs?
No. While we recognize that lower-end models are more affordable up front, we don’t feel they can deliver enterprise-level performance in the longer term, so we don’t recommend going below our minimum specifications listed above.
What about Macs?
Although many of us at Xantrion are Apple fans, we don’t typically recommend Macs to our clients, primarily because we feel the Mac user experience is inferior in certain key business applications. Most critically, Microsoft Excel for Mac lacks multiple functions and tools that PC users take for granted – in fact, power users say Excel for Windows is the only “real” Excel. We’ve also found that Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive work better on a PC. Finally, Apple is in the process of moving from Intel chips to its own Apple Silicon chipsets. In general, we steer our clients away from being early adopters, because significant hardware changes almost inevitably affect the computing experience in ways we can’t yet predict or plan for.
We expect that many people will be working primarily or entirely from home for some time to come. So, if you’re already struggling to get business level home performance from your home computer, we think you’ll be much happier investing in a computer that’s built for business but can do double duty for home use. Enjoy shopping! We’re here to help once you have a new computer to add to your network!