I was recently having a chat over a few beers with a couple of friends who are IT teachers and because we are sad and mainly talk about work they where telling me about these cool new devices that most schools are buying to store Laptops and/or iPads. They referred to them as Laptop Trolleys, although I think a more adapt name would be Laptop Storage Cabinets.

Anyway, I thought I would have a look around as to whether or not one of these things would be suitable for the home/office. Personally, I have 3 laptops, one for design work, one for development and an ultra small one for when I’m travelling. I also have an Android Tablet and my wife has her own laptop. This means that we have a total of five devices in the house, making charging all this kit and finding somewhere to store it a bit fo a nightmare.

So what do these things do? From what I can find from a bit of Googling the main thing they do is provide somewhere safe to store your devices that will charge them at the same time. There seems to be three main manufacturers of these things, Monarch, Loxit  and Lapsafe. After a quick Google for “laptop trolleys” I found plenty of people selling them, but unfortunately an average cost of around £700 seems to rule them out for use in the Bennion household. Also, the storage capacity and size of the average Laptop Trolley is too large for home use. They seem to be the size of my small drinks cabinet and hold around 30 laptops, I like my drinks cabinet dearly and I don’t have 30 laptops.

In conclusion, although these products do seem to be a really good idea, they seem too expensive and too large for practical use at home. However, I can completely see how useful they would be in a school environment and I think they could be useful for a business with lots of laptops maybe communal laptops or iPads used by a sales force. I found a few good suppliers but a company called ICT Direct seemed to provide the best prices and the best choice of Laptop Trolleys, click here for their website. They had a smaller trolley that was for 10 laptops, which I was tempted with!