For the past year, lady Hillary and I have been doing most of our work on our laptops. They are more convenient and are portable. The only concessions we make to security other than Avast antivirus is that we do not keep our passwords on the computer. While this requires that we sign in to all of our significant web sites, it also keeps us fairly safe. There are plenty of peripherals available and both speed and hard drive capacity is on a par with desktop units.

Our setup is: three laptops [one in each room], a central desktop to act as the central unit for our printers, scanner and central disk burner, three printers: HP Photosmart, HP color laser and HP black and white laser printer. Our rationale is that for really high quality color printing, we use the photosmart; for high quality black and white, the b/w laser and for general color, the color laser. The negative side of the color laser is that when you print anything, even in black and white, you use color toner. This runs the price way up unnecessarily.