The best home office laptops: How to find the ideal business notebook for your home office

Slim, light, powerful and versatile: these are the requirements for a home office or office laptop. Modern home office notebooks come with everything you need to work from home, including a display, keyboard and touchpad. In contrast to a simple desktop PC for office applications, they are much more space-saving and mobile. This means you always have all your programmes and data with you, even if you frequently switch between the office and the home office.

What equipment does a laptop need for the home office or office?

In our guide, we show you which features and characteristics the ideal business laptop has. Which processor and how much RAM do you need? How big should the display of your office laptop be and is a resolution of more than Full HD necessary in the home office? Why are a USB-C port or Thunderbolt 4 indispensable, especially in the home office? Does it make a difference whether you choose an AMD Ryzen or Intel Core CPU? What else should you look for when buying a notebook for the home office and office?

In general, the bigger and more powerful an office laptop is, the louder it is. If you don't need maximum performance, go for an efficient laptop with sufficient but not oversized processor and graphics card power. The lower noise level is easier on your nerves in the office and allows undisturbed, concentrated work. Many laptops also come with several performance profiles that allow you to choose the optimal balance between performance and quiet operation.

Basic question: What display size or laptop size for home office?

The size of an office laptop depends primarily on individual user behaviour. A light and slim 14-inch device, for example, is ideal for those who frequently change their place of work. This includes not only switching from the home office to the workplace in the office or taking the business notebook with them to work in a café.

Those who frequently switch between the height-adjustable desk and their own sofa in the well-equipped office at home are also well served by models that are as compact and light as possible. Many of these laptops weigh only a little more than 1 kg - perfect for long-term transport in a backpack or briefcase.

Office laptops with a 15.6-inch or 16.0-inch screen offer the best compromise between a larger display, good portable features and usually more performance. The case size is almost identical, but in contrast to the 15.6-inch laptop with a 16:9 screen format, 16-inch laptops have a 16:10 display.

17.0-inch (16:10 display) or 17.3-inch (16:9 display) laptops for the home office are the best choice for you if you are not looking for maximum portability but for the largest possible screen. They are often somewhat thicker and heavier than office laptops in the compact class, but they often offer you the highest performance.

Display resolution and brightness

In terms of display resolution, a Full HD display (1920 x 1080 pixels) or a WQHD display (2,560 x 1,440 pixels in 16:9 format, 2,560 x 1,600 pixels in 16:10 format) is perfectly adequate for most office and multimedia tasks. UHD resolution or a 4K display (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) are primarily aimed at creative professionals.

While a 16:9 display gives you more horizontal viewing area, a 16:10 display gives you a little more vertical viewing area - practical for long texts, displaying programming code or Excel spreadsheets with countless rows.

Make sure the display is sufficiently bright; we recommend at least 300 cd/m2. But beware: cheap office laptops for less than 500 euros often only offer significantly darker laptop screens that, with some effort, can only reach 250 cd/m2 or less. For all laptops for home offices that you can buy from bestware, you will find reliable information on display brightness in the technical data.

Which processor, how much RAM and how much storage space should home office laptops have?

A solid laptop configuration for the home office relies on an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5, 16 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD. Look for a current CPU with at least 4 cores and 8 threads. Only 8 GB of RAM, on the other hand, is the absolute minimum if you really don't use more than a word processor and an internet browser.

With this equipment you are ready for any office applications and even for small multimedia tasks, because all current laptop processors already come with highly efficient and yet high-performance integrated graphics solutions (iGPU, integrated Graphics Processing Unit). AMD's iGPU is called AMD Radeon RX Vega, while Intel's is called Intel Xe Graphics. Intel's graphics chip already supports hardware-accelerated decoding of AV1 video material ex works.

As a low-priced but high-quality business notebook, we recommend the SCHENKER WORK series, which has everything you need for work - modern equipment, long battery life and good performance.

If you need a bit more CPU power, go for the faster Intel Core i7 and AMD Ryzen 7 or Core i9 and Ryzen 9. Important tip: The two major processor manufacturers have different CPU series in their range that offer different levels of performance and efficiency. A brief overview:

• Processors from the U series are deliberately optimised for efficiency. They offer a lot of power for slim ultrabooks and focus on good performance with low consumption. Only Intel also offers P-series CPUs - a link between the efficient U-series and faster processors.
• CPUs from the H or HX series, on the other hand, offer you maximum performance. Accordingly, they consume more power and are more demanding to cool. However, if you need more than just simple office programmes, these processors can be the right choice depending on the use case.

You only need 32 GB of RAM and more if you frequently use your notebook in the home office for demanding image editing or video editing. In this case, a dedicated graphics card (dGPU) that goes beyond the performance of the integrated graphics chips can also be worthwhile: with GPUs from a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti or RTX 4050 Ti, you already get an enormous amount of performance for graphics acceleration of tasks in the area of image and video editing.

In this higher performance class, you will find the ideal work laptop for home with the multimedia laptops from the SCHENKER MEDIA series or the slim SCHENKER VISION ultrabooks. The latter are available both with an efficient, integrated Intel graphics chip and with a more powerful NVIDIA GPU.

A 500 GB SSD is usually large enough for home office laptops. If necessary, you can configure all home office laptops that you can buy on bestware with a larger SSD hard drive. An alternative is to store data in the cloud - for example in Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox - in order to synchronise them across different devices and always have the latest version at hand.

What connections does an office notebook need?

Laptops with good connectivity are just as flexible as desktop PCs. But here, too, the following applies: What connections you need depends on your personal usage behaviour.

In the home office or office, USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 can solve many problems. You can use these to connect a powerful dockingstation for notebooks and connect your laptop to the entire periphery at the workplace via just one cable. A docking station allows you to connect many additional devices - from external display over external SSDs and printers to a complementary full-size keyboard or a mouse.

To ensure that you have no other restrictions in terms of flexibility, a notebook for the home office should already have an abundance of connections without an additional docking station. In addition to several USB-A ports, you should also look for a modern and versatile USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 connection. Note: Thunderbolt 4 is currently only available in Intel processors, but not in AMD-based laptops.

To connect additional, external monitors on the desk, your business laptop also needs an HDMI or DisplayPort output. Often, however, the laptop's USB-C or Thunderbolt port also provides an integrated DiplayPort stream. In this case, you can connect external monitors via a suitable cable or a DisplayPort adapter. An integrated SD card reader or microSD card reader is also practical for fast data exchange.

Reliable input devices: keyboard and touchpad

For anyone who works a lot and for a long time on their office laptop, high-quality input devices are indispensable. A keyboard suitable for multiple typists with a good pressure point and a precise touchpad ensure fatigue-free continuous use. LED backlighting makes it easier to read the key labels in dark environments. Depending on the functionality you need, you can choose a laptop with a compact keyboard or a full-size keyboard with dedicated arrow keys and a number pad.

The touchpad of a business notebook should also allow precise inputs without dropouts. Many high-end office notebooks therefore use a Microsoft Precision-compliant glass touchpad. If you frequently switch between touchpad and mouse on your laptop, make sure that the gliding surface can be completely deactivated - this will prevent accidental input errors when you use the notebook keyboard in combination with an external PC mouse.

Webcam and integrated microphone

If you often take part in video meetings in your home office, make sure you have a laptop webcam with good quality. In addition to HD webcams, higher-resolution Full HD webcams are currently gaining ground, which provide a sharper image in the video conference. In the quiet environment of your home office, a conventional, integrated laptop microphone is sufficient to record your voice clearly and distinctly. Some business laptops also offer microphones with built-in noise reduction to filter out ambient noise.

If the sound quality of the integrated laptop speakers or microphone isn't enough, you can quickly and easily supplement your laptop with a headset.

Office laptops with long battery life

A slim and light business ultrabook and very long battery life need not be a contradiction in terms. Even a slim 14-inch device like the SCHENKER VISION 14 integrates a large battery with a capacity of 99 Wh (watt hours) despite its very compact casing. Depending on the notebook, you can achieve a battery life of more than one working day or even over 12 hours. Test reports and reviews give you a good overview of what to expect from a particular model.

If you work primarily in the same place and usually have your laptop connected to a power supply, the battery capacity will be less important to you. Also remember: the bigger the battery, the heavier the weight.

Tip: To extend the life of your battery in continuous use, some laptops offer a particularly gentle, slower charging function. If you use your business laptop mainly at your own desk and connected to a power supply, you can often limit the maximum charging capacity to 80 per cent, for example, so that the battery lasts longer.

Buy a laptop for your home office at bestware

At bestware, you can buy office laptops with a good price-performance ratio that meet the most diverse requirements for the desired performance. The range covers a very wide price and performance range and extends from simple office notebooks to high-quality, stylish business laptops with Windows 11 in slim aluminium or magnesium housings, which also score points at home in the home office with their extraordinarily elegant design. All products purchased at bestware.com also come with a generous 36-month warranty ex works.