How to find stolen laptop or track stolen laptops for Free? Tracking stolen laptop and knowing its whereabouts may give a chance to recover it. Think about losing your photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced. Laptop theft is a a major worry and threat to laptop users. The computers and laptops became the integral part of our daily life and to loose your laptop means you lose part of your life.
According to Wikipedia “The Computer Security Institute/FBI Computer Crime & Security Survey found the average theft of a laptop to cost a company $31,975. The incidence of laptop theft has been growing at a steady rate as laptop use continues to grow, and more than 1 in 10 laptops will be stolen within their lifetime.”
So what is the best way to track and recover (if possible) the stolen laptop? There are many services and software are available which can be used to keep track of the location of the stolen laptop. Almost all of them are shareware applications. Prey is an open source solution for PC, MAC and Phones(Android). Prey keep track of your phone or laptop at all times.
How to Use Prey to Track your Laptop or phone?
You need to download and install Prey in your Laptop or Phone. Each of the OS has different versions of Prey available. When installing, Prey saves two keys locally on your device’s your user (API) and your device key. Using these when sending requests allows the Control Panel to know which device to assign the requests it receives to. You can use the control panel to track your device.The Control Panel allows you to control Prey remotely, managing the state of your device. Prey lets you check online about the status of your device and send you email notifications in the event you have set your device to be lost.
The software installed in your device will not do much work until it gets activated by marking the device lost. This is done either by marking your device as missing in the Control Panel or sending the activation SMS if installed on a phone.
But what if the person/thief formats the computer? Then no choice you cannot track or recover it using any tracking software. So one solution for this is setting a BIOS password and disable booting from removable devices on your PC. This will force the thief to boot into the previous installation. In case of Mac you can use the firmware password utility on your Mac OS installation DVD.
To learn more about Prey and how it works visit the Prey Project.
Download Prey
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