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.
If any one above helps to find stolen laptop ,that will be very useful indeed rahter than Laptop the data in it is important to me.
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@venkat,
Very true. LocateMyLaptop does exactly that.
@Hariharakumar,
Adeona is cool, concept-wise. But it is still under research.
me laptop was taken i had lojack they must of cleaned the hard drive so you cant get it back they should make some thing that youcan have put in the laptop like they have on boats is they go down that puts off a gps signal
Adeona is my favorite, thanks for the useful article
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Nice resources, but I don’t have a lappy to try them out.
I was aware of Adeona..but other tools I never used or get my hand on..Nice list raju!
Meanwhile plz consider activating threaded comments from discussion option of your admin panel.
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My theme currently is not compatible with Wp2.7, even if I enable it from admin panel, the theme won’t support it.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know about this before. there are free tools to track the stolen laptop. great.
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I am glad you liked it
LocateMyLaptop looks cool to me with the self-destruct command.
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I prefer desktop than laptop.Actually, I never heard all of this before. Thanks for sharing =)
I’ve never heard such a thing before! Thanks for the tips. But, are those things required a big space in our hard disk? Or is there any bad side effect when I use them?
@Fatin Pauzi,
They do not occupy much space in HD. And no side-effects as well. Go ahead and give them a try.
Owh ok. Thanks a lot, Raju.
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Adeona is not available what else can I use? My laptop is a Sony vaio and it got stolen it needs password to get in but with hackers sure enough wouldn’t be a problem, pls help
@Raki,
do you mean you already lost the laptop? I am extremely sorry, you ought to have one of these tools installed for a hope to recover it back
what about Prey? it’s also open source and runs on mac, linux as well as windows. seems like a good solution!
Hi Raju,
Thank you for the list. Besides those 4 listed, would you like to give AsseTrax a try? It’s a new product developed by our company. We’re giving 30-day free trial. Let me know if you or your readers are interested. Thank you!
is there any program to find lost mobile ? coz Mobiles are lost more then Laptops
so if any tracking system or software available for lost mobiles wud b gr8
@Tech Buzz,
Have a look at these articles
http://techpp.com/2009/06/26/track-your-lost-or-stolen-mobile-phone-using-phone-guardian/
http://techpp.com/2009/06/21/free-cell-phone-tracking/
My laptop was stolen in November 2009 dell Inspiron 1420 model PP26L.It was stolen from Gulu -Uganda, in an internet cafe, Nile Computers Ltd, cashier desk
Please help me recover with this software
Thanks
John
Very interesting post – it was new to me. Thanks.
Adeona is not functioning
What if my laptop was stolen and I dont have this software is there any way I can track it or am I SOL
my laptop dell 1055 s/n17275386421 was stolen22 jan near beirut, tell me pls how can i find its location
I found this program on google.
Seems to work pretty good and is free, but is windows only and lacks some features that paid programs have.
http://www.laptoplocator.net
PreyProject.com, hands down the best (and free).