thumb drive at work

cootambear

would it be possible to use a thumb drive at work to run say Word on it for personal writing, so that the companies IT dept dont become aware of it?

debitcardmayhem

cootambear wrote: »

would it be possible to use a thumb drive at work to run say Word on it for personal writing, so that the companies IT dept dont become aware of it?

Depends on whether they disable USB or not, and whether they have keyloggers .

Edited: Use a pen and paper, unless the office Jobsworth makes you bring back empty biros before they give you a new one.

Richie-from-the-Boro

cootambear wrote: »

would it be possible to use a thumb drive at work to run say Word on it for personal writing, so that the companies IT dept don't become aware of it?

If you mean copying a doc made from your companies MS word from your your work puter to the the thumbrive possibly. If you mean installing MS word onto your company puter beneath the radar of the IT dept and then using it .. .. .. I'd stick to gardening my friend !

fwor

Yes - if you are prepared to take risks then there is no reason why - provided your work PC allows you access to the BIOS setup - you couldn't boot and run it from a pendrive with something like pendrivelinux and use OpenOffice to edit documents in Word format.

This approach would leave no trace on the PC, but if you are caught while doing it there's a fair chance it would be a dismissable offence.

Anything else will probably leave too much evidence behind on your PC for you to argue your way out of - though in reality the risk level may be low, depending on who you work for...

StumpyPumpy

No legitimate versions of MS Word will run from a thumb drive - are you suggesting that you want to run pirated/hacked software on a computer at work? Assuming that the company you work for likes to be legal - and judging by the fact that you want to hide from IT, it probably does - this is a good way to get yourself sacked. Of course, I know what you really meant to say was OpenOffice portable, which is legit and will run off a thumb drive, however I know of several scenarios where people have had written warnings just for using their own (legal) software on company resources without authorisation. But you might be lucky. In my experience, companies either don't care much or drop on offenders like a ton of bricks. I remember (years ago) a whole department being disciplined for playing Descent one lunchtime across the company network, though they only got caught because it choked the network bandwidth and we were all running around trying to figure out what the problem was, but I digress.
In a properly administered Windows network IT will be able to see pretty much everything you do if they so desire. In Vista and later, Group Policy Objects can be set to stop you being able to read or write (or both) a USB disk and there are other, equally effective ways of doing the same in earlier versions. They can also track your activity. It all depends on how locked down they want to be.
If it was one of my Windows Networks and I'd locked it down, you wouldn't be able to do it. If I hadn't locked it down, you would, but if I were so minded I could still find out about it. OK, I may be a special case. I have been known to give lectures on computer forensics at police events and though I probably wouldn't care enough to bother investigating you, it isn't that difficult; and as you seem to be worried about them finding out, is it really worth the risk?

aerostar

Open Office as a portable version that can be loaded onto a USB key and run on whatever computer you use, assuming that the USB has not been disabled.

WhiteChristmas

I'm not reading cootam's query as you lot are.

I think his company PC has Word on it and he wants to use it for something private - maybe his CV - and wants to store the file on a pen drive.

In this case, just saving the file to the USB doesn't mean there's no record of it on the PC itself; there will be recoverable temporary copies from the autosave etc, but recovering them would require conscious effort and a bit of know-how.

Richie-from-the-Boro

WhiteChristmas wrote: »

I'm not reading cootam's query as you lot are.

I think his company PC has Word on it and he wants to use it for something private - maybe his CV - and wants to store the file on a pen drive.

In this case, just saving the file to the USB doesn't mean there's no record of it on the PC itself; there will be recoverable temporary copies from the autosave etc, but recovering them would require conscious effort and a bit of know-how.

#3 assumed both scenario's, until the O/P responds we will never know.

movilogo

Use online Word like Google Docs or Zoho. It is not good practice to circumvent company's IT system.