How to make sure your laptop is still portable

A year ago I was buying a new personal laptop, which would be used for all personal tasks (web, email, music, movies), hobby development projects and occasional gaming.The decision at that time was to buy the biggest and most powerful (well, at least big and powerful enough) laptop out there, for those reasons:

• For the mentioned tasks, I needed computing power
• I think the bigger the screen(s) - the better.
• At that point in my life, I was trying to not buy any more stuff, than I needed, to be able to move with relative ease - that meant no external monitors.
• My laptop moved only between my living room and bedroom, so size/weight didn't matter

I've  ended up buying Dell XPS 17 (17"@FullHD/i7/6GB RAM/GT555M 3 GB/2x500GB HDD), with which I was quite happy at that time.

As everything in life - the situation changed now - I'm working from home, so I needed to buy external monitors for productivity, so the screen size on the laptop itself doesn't really matter. And as I'm connecting to a remote machine to do the actual work on - the computing power of the laptop itself doesn't matter that much. Plus, I'm traveling around 30% of my time, which means, that I have to carry this laptop around quite a lot.

Given all of the changes above, there are no more reasons for me to have this huge beast, but this blog post is not about my need to change hardware.

I have realized, that I almost never remove my laptop from my desk now (except when I'm traveling). Even though I'd maybe like to watch a movie in some different location, or work in my balcony. When I started analyzing the possible reason, I discovered, that the main reason is not the size or weight of the laptop - the main thing is.... all the external devices connected to it (two monitors, printer, headset, microphone and a charger), which means, that I'd have to disconnect all of these and then reconnect them again each time I move my laptop somewhere else. And this wouldn't change even if the laptop was a 10" ultraportable.

The solution obviously is a docking station. What came as a surprise to me, even if your laptop doesn't have a docking port, you can still buy a universal USB docking station (like this one), which will not only connect your network, USB and audio, but even a monitor or two. The only drawback in these is that they won't charge your laptop, but hey, I'd still be down from 6+ cables to only two.