Their compactness, and portability makes laptop particularly useful to professional, person on go, and student. However, laptops can get rather expensive so you should take care to choose a laptop with right amount of features, but not so many that they needlessly inflate price.

Here are 9 basic features that you should consider before you purchase your next laptop:

1. Weight and Size: When it comes to weight and size, you should consider that bigger a laptop is, heavier it is. A small enough size should be chosen, but not so small that it's uncomfortable. The smaller laptop, more awkward it will be to type on that tiny keyboard.

2. Display: The display, or screen is directly tied in to size of laptop. You should choose biggest display possible. Also, a decision has to be made between Active, and Passive Matrix.

Active Matrix is more expensive, but is recommended since pictures come out sharper and moving images play out smoother. Passive Matrix is cheaper, but picture quality is not as good.

3. Batteries: There are 3 main types of Batteries. They are Li, NiMH, NiCad. What those letters stand for is not important. All you need to know is to always choose Li since they are higher quality, and provide a longer life. However, they are slightly more expensive. If one is strapped for money, then NiMH is acceptable. They're slightly cheaper, but must be recharged every hour or so. Under no circumstances should NiCad be chosen. They're extremely low quality, and have no staying power.

4. Hard-Drive: Most laptops start with at least 4.3 gigabytes, or GB, of hard drive space. However, you can get more hard-drive space if you think you’ll need it.

But working from home while using a wireless local area network (WLAN) may lead to theft of sensitive information and hacker or virus infiltration unless proper measures are taken. As WLANs send information over radio waves, someone with a receiver in your area could be picking up transmission, thus gaining access to your computer.

They could load viruses on to your laptop which could be transferred to company's network when you go back to work.

Up to 75 per cent of WLAN users do not have standard security features installed, while 20 per cent are left completely open as default configurations are not secured, but made for users to have their network up and running ASAP.

It is recommended that wireless router/access point setup be always done though a wired client.

Change default administrative password on wireless router/access point to a secured password.

Enable at least 128-bit WEP encryption on both card and access point. Change your WEP keys periodically. If equipment does not support at least 128-bit WEP encryption, consider replacing it.

Although there are security issues with WEP, it represents minimum level of security, and it should be enabled.

Change default SSID on your router/access point to a hard to guess name. Setup your computer device to connect to this SSID by default.