Company issued laptop for personal use?

[Dida]

I am on a long overseas assignment. The personal laptop I brought is dead, so I am now forced to use the one issued by my employer for personal stuff like skyping with gf, browsing, reading electronic books (on thumb drive) and watching movies (on thumb drive). I am not connected to the employer's network when doing these. Would they still know my activities on my laptop? How do I erase any trace after use?

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Moderator Action: Moved to CompTalk.

 

[Hitti-Litti]

Why would they punish you for using company issued laptop for such harmless things? If you're worried about your employer seeing your personal stuff, use CCleaner (?) to remove everything you want to be removed.

 

[Zelig]

Would they still know my activities on my laptop?

Depends if it was setup with this in mind.

How do I erase any trace after use?

Best solution is probably to boot to a clean operating system.

 

[shadowplay]

Be cautious - I know at HP for example they keep a pretty close tab on company issued laptops. I wouldn't do anything on it you wouldn't be comfortable with the company knowing you did.

 

[Abaddon]

Guess you are going to have to go old school and pay for your porn..

 

[wolfigor]

Companies reserve to themselves the right to check the usage of the laptop they gave you.
In some countries they cannot do it without actually informing you about it.
In any case they may be able to check what you did with the laptop they gave you.
It should be written in your company's employee guidelines what's allowed and what is not allowed... if you follow the guidelines you always on the safe side.

The real important bit is to know how much leverage you have for it.
Most of the companies do not care if you skype with you gf, or read books, or watch movies on such machines.
Most of the companies don't give really a damn about what you do on those laptops until there is an internal investigation or they want to fire you.
Only at that time they get interested.

Guess you are going to have to go old school and pay for your porn..

not necessary... for most of the setup, you can always run the browser in "incognito" mode, maybe from a USB and you should be safe.

For extra safety a software like http://www.sandboxie.com/ may help

 

[PeteAtoms]

Yeah. I think if you have a cd-rom drive, you can burn a copy of Ubuntu and run the OS straight from the disc drive. You'd be able to surf the net and such, but you won't have use of the drive (obviously) if you wanted to watch dvd's or something.

 

[deanej]

Or you could just make a bootable USB stick. They're very easy to make in Ubuntu but I don't know of a way to reliably make bootable USB sticks outside of it. Tried UNetbootin (with Fedora) but it failed.

 

[PeteAtoms]

The only reason I didn't mention bootable USB drives is because I have no idea how to get one working. I've never tried and burning a disc is really easy w/ an iso.

 

[kiwitt]

Be cautious - I know at HP for example they keep a pretty close tab on company issued laptops. I wouldn't do anything on it you wouldn't be comfortable with the company knowing you did.

I used to rebuild ex-user laptops and it is amazing how much porn and piracy I found on them.

 

[warpus]

When I first started this job and logged into my new machine and snooped around a bit I found a TON of porn.

Brought in my external hd the next day, copied it, and wiped it.