The Altra Adjustable Laptop Cart - a Product Review

The Altra Adjustable Laptop Cart is currently sold through Staples stores. The listed online price is $29.99 for a cart with cherry wood grain finish on the work surface, but if you visit an actual Staples store, you can find a version with a black plastic work area for $19.99. This latter version doesn't seem to be listed for sale on the Staples website, and may be a close-out special.

Whichever way you go, it's essentially the same product with the same components, the only difference will be the material used in the surface that your laptop and mouse rest on. You get the same black metal base, to which you attach (included) casters at the bottom to enable the cart to be rolled around. The work surface that holds the laptop is adjustable to five tilted angles, while the mouse surface portion is fixed in a flat position. The base position is just over two feet high, adjustable up to about three feet.

Before all that, however, you get to assemble the unit, as it comes completely in pieces. Fortunately, it has one of the better arrangements of parts I've seen. The instructions are clear for the most part, and the individual parts, down to the different types of bolts and nuts, are in individual baggies labeled with different letters. The instructions could be a little clearer on how to adjust the cart for left-handed users, however, and they also fail to mention that the vertical bar has a screw hole that needs to be facing the outside of the unit - you can easily assemble it the wrong way, and then find out at the end you can't attach the adjustable knob necessary for elevating the base height. Putting it together can be pretty awkward for one person, with a lot of long parts with long bars sticking out at multiple odd angles that you have to hold together while also holding a nut steady with a cheap little wrench while ALSO simultaneously screwing a bolt into place. It really, really helps to have another person present to hold and stabilize things while you put this together, but it's doable alone, albeit with some swearing. A proper set of drivers and a real wrench also speeds things up quite a bit and cuts down on the hassle. I'd estimate assembly takes about twenty minutes for one person with the included crappy tools, fifteen minutes for two people with the included crappy tools, and eight to ten minutes with two people and real tools.

Once assembled, I found it notably wobbly. Even with everything tightened as much as possible, the top surface shakes annoyingly when typing or moving the mouse around. I have a temporary jury-rigged solution in having the unit wedged into a corner of a room with rubber stoppers bracing it in the little space between the desk and the wall, which has gotten the shaking down to a tolerable level. On a forum I saw someone recommend something called "SlideGlide" furniture sliders to stabilize the unit, screwed in where the casters normally go. I'll give those a try when I find some, and report back in the Comments section down below.

The top surface is fine for my 17" laptop with a large mouse pad, and there's a comfortable amount of room to manipulate the mouse, though there's really no room for anything else at all. I definitely would not try to support anything heavier than a standard laptop on this thing, given the wobbling issues and lack of a support beam directly underneath the main surface area where the computer sits.

The $19.99 price is right if you don't mind a little tinkering to stabilize it properly. It works well enough for a quickie solution for laptop usage in a small space, or needing to scoot a laptop from room to room frequently. Just don't expect it to do more than the absolute basics of holding up a laptop and mouse, or to replace a good computer desk.