For nearly eight years I've been working out of a home office, and only recently has it been a comfortable experience. I've gone from sharing a spare bedroom with my wife and kids' computers to a space of my own in the basement. And thanks to the wonders of modern computer technology, it's become a great place for me to work. My wife jokingly calls it "The Command Center."

The biggest challenge I faced was having to work on two systems, often at the same time. On the Windows side, I'm running Vista on a great little laptop, the 14-inch Lenovo T61. It drives a Dell 24-inch monitor, and I use the Lenovo's screen as a second one, often with Photo Mechanic, my broswer, living there. Wanting to keep my hands in XP as well, I've got an AMD tower my son Nathan built sitting under the desk, and since the Dell monitor has both DVI inputs and VGA, I only have to push a button on the Dell to switch the signal from the Lenovo to the AMD. The AMD's also got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse attached, so I can keep them tucked away until I need them.

On the Mac side, I switched from a tower to a MacBook Pro a year ago and haven't looked back. In addition to running OSX, I also have Vista loaded on it for when I need both systems while traveling. It's hooked into a 23-inch Cinema Display, and the MacBook screen usually has my email and Safari (the Mac browser) on it.

Keeping all four screens on their best behavior is the Eye-One Photo color management package from GretagMacbeth (now part of X-Rite).

There were two hard parts to getting everything to play nice together - how to share data between the two systems, and how to avoid multiple keyboards and mice.

I solved the data problem last fall by adding an Infrant Ready NAS to my office. That's a Network Attached Storage device, which means it's a small box that's a server with a bunch of drives inside. With four 400GB drives, that's a total of 1.6TB, and using Infrant's RAID 6 I have 1.2TB of usable space with redundancy. With gigabit ethernet, I can hit the server from any of my computers with fast access. Both systems back up to the server every night, so that lets me sleep well.

The only downside to the NAS is that It's not as fast as a USB 2.0 or Firewire hard drive, so I have two of those where I keep image collections I'm frequently needing very fast access to (totaling several hundred gigabytes), and simply plug the one I need into the computer where I need it. Not pretty, but very functional.

For the keyboard and mouse I use an IOGear KVM switch. With it I can have two computers (even Mac and Windows) share one keyboard and mouse, and there are also two USB ports on the switch that can be shared as well. Into one of those I've connected the USB hub that connects to my office's printers (all seven of them!) and scanner. With the simple push of a button I can switch from the Lenovo to the Mac. It's really nice.

So what's next? Nothing, I hope. I've got a good chair, comfortable lighting, and a view of the squirrels outside taunting my dogs. So it's probably time to get back to work, and a great workplace it is.