4 FREE Tools to Track & Recover Your Stolen Laptop,

(05 Apr, 2009 by Raju PPFeatured, Gadgets, Tech)

Off late, in coffee shops, college campuses, hotel lobbies and even in cars, laptops and notebook computers are being targeted by criminals. And these incidents are increasing at an alarming rate. As per FBI, 97% of the stolen laptops are never recovered. That is a staggering stat. But don’t worry, we can increase the odds of recovering / tracking your stolen laptop and that too for FREE!

Ways to Track and Recover your Stolen Laptop

1. Track your Stolen laptop with Adeona

Adeona from University of Washington provides an open source, free and completely non-proprietary way to track your stolen laptop. You can install Adeona on your laptop and go as there’s no need to rely on a single third party! What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can be rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop. You can read the detailed article on Adeona here.

2. Locate your laptop with LocateMyLaptop.com

LocateMyLaptop is a free service that offers a stealthy app on your laptop which reports its position whenever the computer is connected to the Internet. If it’s lost or stolen, you can issue a self-destruct command to erase all the data on the hard drive – but that requires upgrading to the Platinum Plan, which costs $3/month. But you do not need to pay anything until the disaster strikes. this is because, tracking of laptop is FREE, and you can upgrade to the platinum service only if your laptop gets stolen.

3. Browser Plugin to Track your stolen Laptop – Loki

Loki is basically a service which can add location of users to any website. But it can be tweaked in such a way that you can log directly into Loki to see your laptop’s location on a map, or enable “sharing” – which blasts your location to a public Web page, to Twitter, Facebook, or a handful of other services. Only concern is, Loki is not always reliable as it sometimes fails to update the public page with laptop’s location. This issue is seen even when Loki browser plugin on the laptop knew where it is. Hopefully this issue should be fixed by the next release.

4. Locate your stolen Laptop with LocatePC

LocatePC is FREE software which lets you track and finally get back your stolen computer or laptop back to you. LocatePC sends you a secret email message from your stolen computer or laptop with some crucial information. But again, we will be hoping that the thief will connect the laptop to the internet before formatting. Still, something is better than nothing right?

Building a process/software something inherent with the PC/laptop/notebook is what one might have to look at. But that will have its own pros n cons with respect to privacy, transfer of laptop etc. Do pour in your valuable thoughts.