The office laptop - is it a free entertainment console?

More Europeans use their laptops for sending personal emails than work-related messages, according to research from Intel.

Non-business applications also make up an important part of laptop use - everything from playing games, which 30 per cent of respondents said they do, to watching DVD movies (29 per cent).

Sending pictures is also popular (29 per cent admitted to that), or even keeping a diary (15 per cent).

But not all companies have a problem with this.

Hedley Potts, head of distributed computing infrastructure group IT at Lloyds TSB Group, pointed out that his employer has a policy of allowing its staff to use business equipment for having fun, where appropriate.

He said: "We want to exploit the infrastructure we are deploying for non-work activities. We allow employees to use the laptops as more of a leisure facility. We do allow people to run MP3s and watch movies on their laptop."

The policy also extends to facilities such as ADSL - if the bank installs ADSL in an employee's home, it looks at making it available for leisure use at the same time.

This brings up a number of security issues, however. How do you prevent employees from using the laptops for activities that either break the law or cause an IT support headache, such as illegal file sharing? Or downloading badly written software that makes the machine unstable?

It's not easy in a controlled office environment, let alone a mobile environment, but it can be done, Potts said. "If you're mainly accessing things through your corporate infrastructure you can track who's doing what. And we do lock a lot of things down, like the registry," he added.

Next year Lloyds TSB is also considering implementing a programme under which employees and employer can share the cost of big IT purchases, such as home computers, which will be used for a mixture of leisure and work.

Users won't be able to install any software without the express approval of the IT department.

However, take a work laptop home with you, and you could find yourself using it for work instead of pleasure - a danger that companies giving laptops to their staff need to think about.

As Clive Longbottom, director of research at Quocirca, said: "Working longer hours doesn't necessarily make for more productive workers. It's important for companies to have policies and practices in place before you think about giving your workers laptops."