That's the position I'm about to be in. Not only does my employer frown upon using personal equipment for direct access to their network, we are changing VPN solution to one that doesn't work with Mac!

I'm warming to the idea of an iPad. We already have one for the house, that everyone uses but I'll wait for the iPad 3 to put in an appearance before I go down that route. I'll need to test that it works with things that I wouldn't want to be doing the company laptop (i.e. online banking).

Mileage on this trick may very depending on the BIOS, but IT departments love Dell because everything can easily be swapped in and out. What about buying a second drive with a Personal OS and personal programs?

Stu

PS: I have been pushing my wife who works for a consulting firm to have management place a consultant who actually seriously travels on the IT committees to act as a counterweight to these guys who make up policies without regarding to the practical realities of travel.

Or create a virtual machine for personal use on the company laptop.

One other option I just thought of was to make a bootable USB stick or external hard drive and boot from that for personal tasks, games, etc. There's no need to actually swap the laptop hard drive if you use something external.

no problems lat months 20 flights into USA from AU, out of USA to AU, intra AU connections, many intra USA mileage runs SFO-JFK JFK-LAX,JFK-SFO,JFK-SFO, LAX-SFO and v.v - no problems with a laptop, and ipad 2 and and iphone 4
only time I've ever had a problem is 3 yrs ago departing Ben Gurion TLV - laptop not a problem but the Israelis didnt like all the adapters I had (USA,EU,CH,UK and AU) _all they did was package everything into foam boxes and check it -so when I arrived in Athens from Tel Aviv my luggage was the first thing off on the luggage belt in 10 minutes! Usually in Athens even as Star Gold you have to wait a good 30 mins for ur luggage (2011,2010) Go Israeli security!

Possible/practical only if your company's laptop hasn't had its BIOS locked to prevent booting from a USB port.

As for the virtual machine idea, my last work laptop had a locked-down network where internet access was only permitted via their proxy. So the VM would have to go through their proxy regardless.