Like Jeff I preferred working with both a laptop and a desktop machine. It didn't seem to matter whether the laptop was mine or the company's, though; I used decent encryption of confidential data on the laptop, but not whole disc encryption. It was great to be able to use secure VPNs to log into my desktop, or into the office servers, or into our servers on customer sites; that also allowed me to work from home a lot more than if I had had only a desktop, and of course working without a desktop would have been impossible because the laptop couldn't deliver all that the desktop could: the "desktop" was actually two fairly nice machines, one running a server OS and used for heavyweight computation - mainly testing - and the other running a client (developer) OS used for development and office stuff.

Here I'll follow Jeff into the off-topic subject of time-wasting meetings 😛

Like Jeff I reckon laptops should generally not be taken into meetings. I also avoid taking more than 1 A4-size sheet of paper to take notes on, and believe that meetings that require as much as a whole page of minutes should be very rare. If someone decides to "be productive" by paying attention to something else they are doing on their laptop instead of to the meeting they have a problem, because we will not waste everyone's time by repeating stuff that shouldn't have needed repeating. Having sensible rules about meetings (which ideally will forbid bringing laptops or tablets into most meetings) can improve productivity no end by cutting out time wasting activities like playing office politics, or dragging people into the meeting because their presence makes the meeting seem important instead of only including people with a contribution to make, having someone act as secretary and generate minutes that are effectively a full transcript of the meeting instead of a record of agreed conclusions and accepted actions, allowing actions to be placed without being agreed by the actionee, and all the other time-wasting nonsense that many junior and middle mis"managers" apparently yearn for.