subject: Different Ways of Recovering Your Lost Laptop [print this page] Different Ways of Recovering Your Lost Laptop
Statistics have shown that around 600,000 laptops are stolen each year. Laptop theft has been on the rise at airports, coffee shops and other public places. If you want to recover your lost device, you should take all the precautionary steps and measures that will make it easy for you to do so, in case of a theft. You can always install an anti-theft software as a preventive measure. However, if you haven't installed such a software in your device, you can always recover it with the help of a .mac or an IP address.
If you want to track your stolen laptop with the help of a .mac address, first notify the theft to your network administrator. However, the problem with this is that the .mac address won't help you if the thief does not get on the same LAN. As such, the recovery is highly unlikely unless you consider a computer used on a university or office network. If the thief logs on to the LAN network from the stolen laptop, the chances of recovery are possible. This will not be possible on a wide area network. You need more than a .mac address to track down your laptop on the Internet.
Chances of lost laptop recovery increase if you use an IP address. You can contact your Internet service provider to check if the thief has logged onto the Internet using your device. When a computer is used to access the World Wide Web, the Internet Service Provider issues an IP address to it which is specific to the location. Once the thief obtains the IP address, the police can track down where the device is located. You can also install anti-theft clients to obtain an IP address for the lost device. The IP information must then be submitted to the law enforcement.
However, the best way to recover lost laptops is to install theft prevention software's. Mostly these software options are open source and free of cost. They monitor and store the location data of the laptop. Some of them also use GeoLocation and WiFi to identify the location of the laptop within ten to twenty meters. The information obtained can then help authorities recover it. They also encrypt the important files and data and make a back up for it. This way no unauthorized user will be able to gain access to and misuse your sensitive information. One such software is Snuko which has all the features to track down your lost device.
Staying alert and keeping a close watch on your laptop will prevent it from getting stolen. However, if you do have the misfortune to lose it, keep the above mentioned things in mind and you should be able to retrieve it in almost no time at all.
