Thoughts on using a personal desktop as work machine?

Relentless81 said:
I'm sat at my desk at home now with my work laptop on my desk, my personal desktop next to me powered off with the keyboard and mouse tucked away, the laptop is plugged into my personal monitor so I can have two screens.

Even if I was allowed to I wouldnt want to use my personal desktop, I've gone to the extreme of keeping them both separate and spent a fair bit of money on cabling, cable tidies Monitor riser etc just to be able to have them both share the relatively small desk. Reason being is what Haggisman said, the amount of work related apps that I'll need to install and configure to connect it would take forever just to get it all configured "Dont mix work and play" applies
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This. So much this. I use a work laptop with USB-C to HDMI so I can use my 1440P ultrawide and then a USB switch box so I can also use my desktop mouse and keyboard. This way I get the best of both worlds. Never would I give my works IT department full, unfettered access to my own PC. Who knows what snooping around they’d do? I have personal items on there. And porn. Lots of porn.
 
MissChief said:
This. So much this. I use a work laptop with USB-C to HDMI so I can use my 1440P ultrawide and then a USB switch box so I can also use my desktop mouse and keyboard. This way I get the best of both worlds. Never would I give my works IT department full, unfettered access to my own PC. Who knows what snooping around they’d do? I have personal items on there. And porn. Lots of porn.
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I use Barrier, allows you to use one keyboard and mouse better machines both running the software. Bloody brilliant. I have my work macbook here on my desk and use my personal PC for what I want and just slide the mouse over and I'm using my work mac. Simple!
 
My work has 55k laptops none of them insured.

Because the insurance for 55k laptops is far more expensive than just buying the 4-5 that get stolen every year.

I'd never use my home pc for work and I'd never use my work laptop for personal stuff.

Clear seperation between the two.

Even with home working I got a new monitor to use solely for work. I may even get a second one for work as it is going to be better for me.
 
+1 for going down the VM route.
Probably comes down to the size and culture of your company, if you're in a smaller company like mine and you have an IT/Security steer you may be able to convince them given the current situation.
I'm currently running a work imagine in Parallels on my Mac which gives them all the EPP they want but also means I can quickly switch between personal and work. Shut down Parallels at the end of the day and you're golden.
 
Im able to use my home PC for work since being in lockdown as we dont lock down our machines. I have installed our CRM and softphone, linked my sharepoint in one drive and away I go. Been nice as using the works 13"laptop all the time is not as good as a proper desk with real keyboard and mouse for 8 hours working.
 
Personal machine for work? HELL NO......No no no no.

Only options I would ever use:-
  • Dedicated machine, although not had to do this in the last 15-20 years
  • VM setup on my personal machine
  • Remote solution into my office machine / VM, preferred solution which I've normally had for the past 10+ years
 
We run a VDI system off Citrix so I have no issues using my own PC for work.

Much better than the kit my work are issuing anyway by the looks of it as others seem to have issues on a daily basis!
 
pepp77 said:
Im able to use my home PC for work since being in lockdown as we dont lock down our machines. I have installed our CRM and softphone, linked my sharepoint in one drive and away I go. Been nice as using the works 13"laptop all the time is not as good as a proper desk with real keyboard and mouse for 8 hours working.
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A similar situation to me I think, tiny laptop screen, touchpad and tiny keyboard just wasn’t going to cut it but picked up some bits to let me use my ultrawide and my desktop mouse and keyboard.
 
I'm sure most work environments wouldn't allow this a work pc is a known quantity a home pc very much an unknown and I can't imagine many companies allowing this. If I could get away with it without telling them I probably would if it made life easier but theres no way I would admit it and I certainly wouldn't allow their IT dept access to my pc.
 
Working on my personal/work provided machine that has the board, processor, ram and power supply in that work bought me and my GPU, case etc. I bought it a few years back as a test bed for some project work I was doing and needed to build an estate at home that they helped me with. All my stuff sits behind a fortigate firewall running UTM and I have a ipsec vpn into the office where local traffic runs local and traffic bound for work is exactly that. It allows me to route h.323 and other traffic between work and home so is kind of my ultimate work from home solution.

I guess it makes it easier that I run the IT dept and nobody in my team is going to be asking their boss for access to this part of the network. With the right security and process anything is possible. I know I have been more lax with my users and my team during this time but at the same time have set things like darktrace to step in earlier should an issue occur. It's all about how robust your kit is and if you can put a stop to threats instantly.
 
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Using my own laptop for work currently, only have one piece of bespoke software which uses a physical licence key so no issues downloading it myself and using the work license. Access to the file servers is via Sophos VPN, so I tend to just log in, copy the files I need over to the company SharePoint drive so I can access it with OneDrive. Already had all the Office 365 apps downloaded.

I would not, however, have my company granted any sort of access to my personal computer. I'd have no objection to the systems being changed, but I'd then require a work provided laptop to do the job.

My other half is working on a similar sort of way, but their setup is remoting into the work system via a web interface, so absolutely nothing downloaded onto the PC with the work system running in its own bubble.
 
I'd keep it seperate tbh... not just seperate HD but separate machine.

The comments about no competent IT dept allowing this are a bit blinkered - it depends on context, BYOD is a thing and will perhaps increase in future.

Ideally your work ought to provide you with a machine (whether that be laptop or desktop) - if underpowered then is there not a desktop or server at work you can connect to? You shouldn't necessarily need amazing resources locally in order to be productive so long as they can provide you with sufficient computational resources remotely.

If you do buy your own kit specifically for work then it's presumably tax deductible too.
 
OPs work laptop isn't poorly specced at all. I would be looking at why it starts chugging.

Make sure you have a whitelisted Dev folder and all your the IDE/Build exes so that the virus scanner doesn't hog all your CPU.

When I specified my team's laptops a year ago, we went with gaming laptops (8750H/GTX1060) because the cooling was far better for the CPU.

I would highly recommend undervolting the CPU with Throttlestop. It helps prevent thermal and PL throttling with high load tasks!

Hope that helps!
 
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