Laptop on a kitchen table and nothing else - what is the smallest change that genuinely helps?

Do the free version for a week before buying anything, because it tells you which of your two problems is bigger and that changes what you spend on.

Stack books under the laptop until the screen is at eye height. Work like that for a day, deliberately, even though typing is now awkward. If your neck feels noticeably better by evening, the screen height was your main problem and a keyboard is the purchase that unlocks it. If your neck is the same, something else is going on and a keyboard alone will not fix it.

The same trick works downwards: try a couple of days typing with the laptop flat but sitting on a firm cushion, so your elbows come up to table height. If the wrists settle, the table height was the issue.

What was a waste for me:

• A laptop stand with no separate keyboard. It solves one problem and creates the other, and it is worse than doing nothing.
• A wrist rest, used the way most people use it: resting on it while typing plants your wrists and makes you reach with your fingers. It is for between bursts of typing, not during.
• An expensive ergonomic mouse bought before I had fixed the height. The mouse was never the problem; my shoulder was up because the table was too high.

That is roughly the price of a keyboard saved.

The single change that matters most is separating the screen from the keyboard, and it is also the cheapest.

A laptop forces one compromise: the screen is at hand height, so either you look down all day or you type with your arms up. Your neck ache and your wrists are the same problem showing up at both ends, which is why fixing one at a time never works.

So: raise the laptop until the top of the screen is roughly at eye level, and put a separate keyboard on the table. Anything that stacks works for the riser, a stand, a box, books. The keyboard is the part you have to buy and it is the cheapest useful thing in this whole discussion.

What that gets you immediately:

• Head upright rather than tilted forward, which is most of the neck ache
• Forearms roughly level, which is most of the wrist problem
• Elbows at your sides instead of out in front

Order of value for your situation, having done exactly this:

1. Separate keyboard plus something to raise the laptop. Transformative.
2. A cushion on the dining chair to raise you, so your elbows sit at table height instead of below it. Dining tables are too high for most people to type at.
3. Something under your feet if the cushion leaves them dangling. A box works.

All of that packs away at dinner time, which is your real constraint.

The thing that outperformed every purchase for me: changing position regularly beats finding the correct one.

Eight hours in a good position still hurts. The load is the duration, not the angle, and this is why people set up a perfect workstation and still ache - they have optimised the posture they now hold rigidly all day.

What that looks like in your constraints, where you cannot adjust anything:

• Stand up every half hour for one minute. A timer, because you will not remember. This one habit did more for my upper back than any equipment.
• Take calls standing or walking. Free, and it breaks up the longest static blocks of the day.
• Deliberately change your setup through the day: an hour at the counter with the laptop on a stack of books is a genuinely different load from the dining chair, and the variety is the point.

Also: an ache that arrives at the same time every afternoon is usually accumulation rather than position, and an ache that is only on one side usually is position. Yours arriving mid-afternoon fits the first pattern, which is why I would try this before spending anything.

If something is painful rather than achy, or it is not settling overnight, that is worth taking to someone who can actually look at you rather than to a thread.