I have a laptop from work, which I use at home to access the internet.

At work we have an outsourced IT company who, when I am in range of wirless network at work, can tap into my machine and take over it.

Can they track what I've been doing on the net? Not bothered about the porn sites:D , more about online banking, private emails and stuff.

probably. If you are running win2k/xp/nt4 on your laptop and they have the admin password to that machine then they can trawl through it.

If you are running any other windows OS then they don't even need that.

If you are running a mac, then the answer is probably too.

You can erase your tracks quite well with a number of utilities that do more than simply clear your caches and cookies. Have a look on download.com for privacy utilities.

If you are a standard user on your laptop (i.e without administrator rights) then there isn't much else you can do about it.

Do you use your laptop at work on a wireless network?

If so then contact your network administrator, he should be able to set up encryption security to protect you.

If he isn't running *any* encryption on the wireless network, see your MD who should fire him on the spot for incompetence!