Laptop Rentals Come to the Rescue of the Small Office/Home Office Owner

Want an example of how laptop rentals can help small business owners who work out of their home? Here's a good one, told to me by a friend, using her voice.

Her story begins as many about laptop rentals do - with a crisis. I'm sure you'll find many aspects of this story familiar:

"I had noticed some changes in the performance of my laptop. It started to slow down - gradually but noticeably. Over the course of a few months, it seemed to be taking longer and longer to open basic Word documents. Spreadsheets were a nightmare! I began timing them. Some took over ten seconds to open, and they were very small files with very simple calculations.

Then I noticed a long, thin line on the monitor that never seemed to go away. I was told by an IT person I know that this was not a good sign.

Next came trouble with the USB ports. I had three on the machine, and I used them for my printer, my cordless mouse and my keyboard. Being a cautious user, I would back up daily to an external hard drive, which meant I had to unplug a couple of peripherals to free up the USB ports. When I went to plug my keyboard back in, it wouldn't work. I had to unplug and reconnect it two times to get it working again. This happened even when I didn't move the keyboard cable. If I unplugged my printer cable, the keyboard would still conk out.

Other problems occurred too. Web pages took forever to load. I knew it wasn't my ISP or wireless network because the other computer in our house was fine.

I ran the disk cleanup and the defrag, which helped for a while. But the performance problems persisted. Then one day I pushed the power button and nothing happened. The laptop was plugged in - as always - and the printer that shared a power bar with the computer was working fine. Eventually I was told that the computer had failed - something with the motherboard - and that it would have to be replaced.

Now I was in trouble. I had a project due, no computer and no idea what model to buy to replace it. Laptop rentals saved the day. I called a local vendor and they had a machine to me the next morning. They had loaded the software I needed and I was able to call up the files I needed from my backup hard drive.

I found another benefit of laptop rentals as well. I discovered some features in the rented laptop that I hadn't had in my old machine. The ports were on the back of my old laptop, making them less accessible than I liked. On the rented computer, the USB and power ports were on the side, making them much easier to reach. And there were more USB ports, which gave me greater flexibility. The headphone jack was closer to the front too, a nice feature consider I am often plugged in when working.

I know that the laptop I rented was higher-end (although still affordable), and I was able to determine that while its big 17" screen was nice, it wasn't a necessity. To confirm what kind of laptop I really wanted, I tried renting a lower-end laptop to see if it had the features and performance I needed. Although I paid an extra week of laptop rental fees, it was worth it to decide what I really needed when it came to buying. All in all, renting a laptop helped me in two ways - by getting me through an emergency and helping me decide on a new machine."

I couldn't have said this better myself. Laptop rentals are a great option when crisis strikes in your home office. I'm sure this person would advise all small business owners to keep the name of laptop rental firm handy, in case disaster strikes.