Travel With a Company Issued Laptop
My personal laptop died this week, mere minutes after I had just moved everything on my local drive to Dropbox. The timing couldn’t have been stranger. The screen went black and then when I tried to reboot it, smoke started coming out of the keyboard. My Mac had met a similar fate a couple months prior. I will now be bringing in an electrician to look at the outlets in my home office before anything else gets plugged in.
This leaves me with only my work-issued laptop plus an iPad for connectivity. After years of self-employment, my recent return to the ranks of working for someone else has been delightful (in that someone else gets to worry about the state of my technology) but also required some thoughtful redirection of my technology habits. It’s been a full ten years since this was last a concern and the world is a much different space. And don’t get me started on weeding through email with the address I’ve had for close to 15 years – I’ve unsubscribee from no less than 250 things in the last month in an attempt to tame that!
Granted, I’m not downloading porn (on any device!) but I do a lot of my volunteer work via Gmail and of course I blog here, which is much easier on a computer than on a mobile device.
So I thought I’d ask YOU, my readers, how you travel with a company issued laptop. Specifically, what do you do differently? If you don’t maintain a personal computer, how do you manage? What apps or tricks exist for iPads that might make the jump easier for me? I’m looking for any and all tips to reboot my digital road warrior lifestyle!
Good idea to have the load checked in the office…and all of your house. You may need additional panel as you do have a lot of plug ins:-). Better to pay to be safe than sorry later.
Why don’t you just get Office 365 for your iPad and get some form of keyboard for it. Since I did that, I hardly use my personal laptop at all and I even use my iPad for work on the road as well. It saves and uploads straight to Dropbox.
I think it all depends on the network setup of your work laptop. I carry mine on just about every personal trip that overlaps a workday, but make sure I am not connected to my work network nor VPN when I need to use it for personal items. I also use Firefox’s private browsing mode when checking personal email so nothing gets saved. That combo has worked well for me, since there are several things I just can’t do on my iPad.
So… you stream porn or do PPV at the hotel? 😛
I just don’t have the room to carry two laptops and my company has so much crap loaded on the systems that they are slow booting and slow operating, and restricted browsing, etc. I use my Android phone for minor stuff.
One of the best tricks I’ve found to utilize my work issued PC as a personal PC while traveling is to either boot off of a “LIVE” CD or USB something like UBUNTU Linux works great – it’s not windows, but you have most of the same functionality – web browsers, email clients, etc. Since nothing get’s written to your PC’s hard drive, you completely protect yourself from malware, spyware, virii, etc once you reboot.