Computer manufacturers take great pains to distinguish their home-user and business-user product lines. But in many cases, home-users would be better off with business computers. While consumer computers are designed for style, business computers offer a tougher chassis, more configuration options and better usability.
Large corporate customers buy computers by the thousands. In order to keep their business clientele happy manufacturers design their machines to a higher standard of quality. That’s why we specialise in fully refurbished, ex-lease laptops and desktops sourced from large corporations and government departments across the world.
Whether it’s about sheer value-for-money, a plethora of features or the amount of power under the hood, business-class computer may surprise you. There’s plenty to like about laptops built for business.
1. More productivity-boosting features
Business laptops exist in more shapes and sizes to cater for an eclectic mix of customers (e.g. blue collar, white collar, engineers, government, artists). Computers built for business are not constrained by consumer-focussed trends like colour, thickness or operating system. Instead they focus on satisfying the needs of the end-user. For example, Lenovo’s ThinkPad keyboards are the gold standard for all laptops, with snappy feedback, strong travel and large, curved keys that are easy to feel without looking.
2. Less potentially harmful bloatware
Bloatware (also known as a number of less complimentary terms) is the name given to pre-installed, non-essential software applications. Bloatware on computers is akin to junk mail stuffed into conventional mailboxes: unwanted and ignored until there’s just too much of it.
Business laptops don’t have as much bloatware because it is inconvenient for large or medium size businesses to invest time in removing pre-installed non-essential software from every computer it orders.
3. Newer, improved pointing options
Most consumer notebooks touchpad for navigation, whereas business computers feature more options like pointing sticks or the red TrackPoint featured on popular Lenovo Thinkpad machines. Several HP ProBooks and Dell Latitudes also have pointing sticks between their G and H keys. Pointing sticks are more accurate than touchpads which can boost productivity, for example, a touch typists never has to lift their fingers off the home row.
4. Additional security and protection
Added security is a core feature of business laptops. From fingerprint sensors to vein readers, smart card readers to TPM (Trusted Platform Module) embedded solutions, business laptops are far more secure than consumer-grade machines. Furthermore it is common for hard drives to offer encryption by default which means that data is secure even if a laptop is lost or stolen. Some manufacturers go the extra mile by offering protection against BIOS tampering at hardware level.
5. Replaceable, upgradeable batteries
Most modern consumer laptops come with a sealed-in batteries that cannot be removed without professional help at a service centre. However, some enterprise product lines feature batteries that can be removed and replaced allowing users to carry spare or upgrade to a larger unit.
The bottom line
Major computer manufacturers have built their organisations around the premise that businesses and home-users have different needs and deserve different products. However, there’s no reason to buy into that marketing hype.
If you need a computer it’s because you have work to do, whether it’s building a website, writing a report or keeping up with friends on Facebook. More often than not, using a business notebook makes that work a lot easier. Discover refurbished, ex-lease enterprise-grade laptops and desktops with Recompute.
