When I last upgraded my personal laptop, I had my old one re-purposed as a work machine, with full disk encryption and secure tunneling into the company system, as it was more powerful and portable than the machine work had supplied.

I also have a full size tower workstation under my desk, which although it is getting on a bit is still one of the most powerful personal PC in the company, and was a good investment as it should have a lifespan of 10 years.

I usually leave the laptop at home and use RD to connect to my workstation, that way if my local broadband connection drops out I don't loose anything important, or a long running process. For some jobs, I use DB/SQLMail (whichever is set up) to send an email to my account/SMS Message via Email to tell me is it has succeeded or failed wherever I am.