
Ask HN: Do you maintain two laptops for work and life? - estilos
I&#x27;ve been running my business stuff from my personal laptop. Moving forward I was by default going to get a second laptop: I&#x27;ve had a work laptop&quot; at all my &quot;real&quot; jobs before. But is there any particular benefit? (everything important is on a server somewhere) What do you guys do?
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cimmanom
If your work laptop is issued by your company and you work on side projects
whose IP you want to continue to fully own, you need a separate home device.
Surely you don’t want your employer to have ownership over your personal
emails? Your contract may even have policies that when read closely or
interpreted conservatively prohibit doing things like social media browsing,
gaming, or online shopping on your work computer.

Even if you’re founding your own startup, keeping IP separate can be
worthwhile from a legal and governance perspective.

I find it can also help with getting into work vs relaxation mindsets to
configure the UIs a little differently to create a sense of boundaries between
the two.

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dman
One thing to keep in mind if you use one laptop/phone, if there is ever a case
/ investigation against your employer your personal device might be called in.

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Pinbenterjamin
I think it is highly dependent on the work you do.

If your two lifestyles are developer (work), and gamer (leisure), then
purchasing 2 workstations to accommodate that could be prohibitively
expensive.

However, if you're a developer by day, and say, love to work on your house at
night, having a decent development workstation, and a simpler pc for browsing
ideas and sketching things out, I would imagine that could be beneficial.

It's all about reviewing the situation that you're in, and seeing what fits
your income and organizational needs.

Personally, I switched to a single laptop for everything. I purchased a laptop
powerful enough to run WoW in the most vigorous situations, and something that
maintains a semi-regular keyboard layout and proper specs to build small to
medium sized applications.

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Someone1234
One laptop, but I VPN -> Remote Desktop into a work PC and keep work stuff
isolated there. This works fine for development/Microsoft Office/etc. It may
not work for all industries though.

The biggest downside is that it assumes a data connection, but given the
development I'm typically involved in that is largely unavoidable regardless.

I do try to keep the Remote Desktop host clean of work files on purpose, in
case it is lost, I quit, the machine dies, or I want to use a different
machine on a whim. As long as I have my physical 2F key and a Cisco Anyconnect
client I can work from any machine.

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5555624
Separate. On my personal laptop(s) I can do whatever I want. On my work
laptop, things are somewhat locked down. Even if it was not locked down,
keeping things separate is just a good idea. It's cleaner.

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bsvalley
I use my work laptop because I have an iMac with a huge screen at home where I
do most of my personal stuff (personal dev, licensed software I use outside of
work, accounting, storage, etc)... I end up having to synch both machines
anyway when I'm on the go since I only have one laptop. Most of that synch
comes from the cloud anyway. The benefit of having one single laptop is that
you can switch contexts when you're traveling, etc. You can connect with work
while doing your personal stuff. The iMac is where I store all my personal
files like photos, etc.

If you need a second machine for personal stuff I'd highly recommend a larger
screen. A desktop machine seems to be a great add-on to your life.

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malux85
The larger screen and compute too! I used a MacBook for the last 5 years but
after switching to a 24 core, 64gb RAM desktop I’m never going back... the
extra horsepower makes my ide, debugging and startup times buttery smooth ...

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Zelmor
Virtual machines for work. One per client, never cross the beams. Host OS is
for own stuff.

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imhoguy
Here too, all on ultraportable laptop docked to large screen.

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sheun
Its better to have separate laptop for your day job and your business. You can
use a virtual machine on your day job laptop and back up your VM on your hard
drive.

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ioddly
I do as of a couple a weeks ago.

Benefits as far as I can tell: mental compartmentalization (this is big; I
wish I could write this in 24-pt red Impact font), makes writing off the
laptop simple rather than having to estimate personal vs. business use.

Downsides: Travelling with two laptops is going to be annoying, expensive if
you're paying for the laptops out of pocket.

This situation was kind of an accident for me, but I like it, enough that I
might go to the trouble of maintaining it.

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ram_rar
if you are an employee, then for love of god, dont cheap out and buy another
laptop for your personal work / side project. My roommate who used to use
company laptop as a personal one, had to go through a lot of legal hurdles
when he moved to a different company.

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estilos
I am currently, but this is more for the post-employment universe :)

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shoo
if you're working as an employee then i'd recommend isolating as many devices
and accounts as feasible. share nothing between work and non-work.

if you're working for your own business and there's any chance you might like
to sell the business to someone else in future, it might also be a good idea
to think about how to decouple the business from the rest of your life.
(perhaps less value in isolating laptops than isolating bank accounts, credit
cards, email addresses, *aas accounts, etc)

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milestone
Separate. Work laptops and personal laptops. A better work/life balance is a
benefit. It helps you focus when there's less distractions on your laptops, it
also looks more professional.

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rahimnathwani
Dual-boot.

