Help me get around IT restriction!

Hey guys,

I have a problem. I work in engineering sales for a Fortune 100 company. They provide us with laptops, which I really only use to access outlook. The problem is... the laptops are unusable. I'm talking a 15 minute wait from pressing the power button until you can press the start menu and expect only a slight delay.

Considering Outlook and access to the exchange server (they only give us 10MB on the exchange server for our inbox.... fills up hourly) is the only reason I have to ever open that laptop.. I have been looking for ways to get my e-mail on my personal PC.

When I'm in the office.. I automatically get connected to our wireless from my work laptop. When I'm remote.. I have to access a remote website.. login (based off my windows password) and join the corporate network for outlook to work.

The other key part of this... is that we DO have an Activesync exchange server so we can access e-mails with IOS devices (only blackberry and IOS at this point... no android or win mo 7)

Anyway.. I feel like my only hope is to somehow channel this remote connection through active sync to get e-mails onto my desktop.

Any ideas?

Considering whom you work for, I'm honestly shocked they only give you a 10 MB email profile. My only suggestion would be to try to store emails locally instead of on the server. I know it's an option somewhere in outlook but my Fortune 100 company uses Lotus Notes (yuk!) Then again, our smallest space allowed is 300 MB.

Bottom line, I'd talk to your helpdesk about this because I'm SURE your company can't want all their employees to operate under such conditions. There would need to be some policy that does it right.

Tell your boss that you lose X minutes every day because your computer is not working properly. Don't say anything about activesynch, don't make it clear that you know anything about technology, just say "my computer boots up in forever minutes and I don't do anything but email!" He'll call the IT boss and yell, and some IT monkey will come do his IT monkey thing to improve your machine. You work at a company so large that doing this yourself will probably only end poorly for you. They pay someone to handle this problem, utilize that person.

Most large company outsource computer support to specialist. Contact the IT person get it solved. This would the best way to go.