How to Recover a Stolen Laptop?
Concerned about losing a laptop and trying to get it back? In this episode the Tech Talker shows you the easy (and free) way how to track your stolen computer!
Before I start this episode I have a story that I think many of my listeners can relate to. My cousin Kevin got his first laptop in high school. He had it all set up for the first day of school and typed out all of his class notes diligently. At the end of the day, he decided he would leave it to charge in his classroom while he went to gym. Big mistake! When he returned, the laptop was nowhere to be found and most of the students had already left for the day. He had to confront his parents with the bad news that he had lost his brand new laptop on the first day of class!
The next day, Kevin went to school and his teacher approached him asking if had left his laptop in the classroom the day before. Turns out, the teacher had seen the laptop left out and put it away before anything could happen. Man, was he lucky! Unfortunately, Kevin was still in a ton of trouble with his parents for being so irresponsible. And this is where I come in.
Kevin’s parents asked me if I knew of any way they could have tracked the laptop had it actually been stolen. Even though that’s pretty impossible to do after a device is gone, the good news is that with a few minutes of your time, you can set up a full-on security system on your portable devices so they can be recovered in the unlucky event of theft.
So in today’s episode, I will tell you how to set up an anti-theft and recovery program on your laptop so if it does go missing, you can actually have a chance of getting it back!
How to Install Anti-Theft Protection on Your Laptop
The program I use to keep my laptop safe is called https://preyproject.com/. You install it once and forget about it until you need it! What happens is this: If someone runs off with your computer, all you have to do is go to the Prey website and report your computer missing. This is when Prey comes to life. The next time the laptop connects to the internet, it will provide you with a wealth of information. It will give you screen shots of what the thief has been looking at on your computer, it will take a picture from your webcam of the thief, and it will even give you their IP address which can be used to narrow down the thief’s location to a few blocks!
Prey is also open source, so if you’re a tech expert, you can take a look at the code behind the software so you can verify that nothing fishy is going on. From all the research that I’ve done, I haven’t heard anything but great things about this program. It works on practically every system too – Linux, Mac, Windows, Android and even IOS! And the best part is that it is free.
At first, the part about it being free seemed too good to be true—until I did a bit more digging. When you report your device missing to Prey, you will get a log that your stolen device sent to you from the Prey website. The basic service is free to use, but the pro edition has many more features along with an increased frequency of logs. So what this means is that with a free account you may only get one log file every two hours, but with a pro account you can get a log file every 2 minutes! Basically that means you can check the status of your computer every 2 minutes, as opposed to waiting two hours for more information. The best part is that you can upgrade at any time. So for myself, I have the free version installed, and if my machine ever gets stolen, I can immediately pay for the premium service in order to help apprehend the thief.
Now I just want to clear a few things up. This is not a be-all, end-all solution. Your computer must be turned on and connected to the internet for https://preyproject.com/ to be activated. So if a thief simply sells the parts of your computer, you’ll be out of luck. But if he or she connects to the internet, Prey is a great first line of defense.
I was reading the recovery stories on Prey’s website and they’re pretty impressive. One guy had his MacBook stolen and pretty much gave up any hope of finding it. Then he remembered that he had installed Prey a while back. He logged onto his account, reported his laptop as missing, and minutes later began getting log files. From here, he got a picture of the thief on the webcam and a screenshot of him logged onto his Facebook page. He then got an approximate location of the laptop, and contacted the police. Not long after, there was a knock at the perp’s door and the cops got a full confession, recovered the MacBook, along with other electronics the guy had not realized were missing yet!
With that said, here are your 3 Quick and Dirty Tips for keeping your gadgets safe:
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Always keep an eye on your electronics—don’t leave them in public.
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Use Prey, or a program like Prey, to keep tabs on your on your device should it go missing.
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Keep a /tech/computers/how-to-create-and-manage-strong-passwords on your device so your data is safe even if your device is stolen!
Well that’s all for today!
Have a question about anything in this episode? Or a suggestion for a future podcast? Send me an email at mailto:techtalker@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email or post it on the https://www.facebook.com/qdttechtalker wall.
Until next time, I’m the https://techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com/, keeping technology simple!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Tech Talker demystifies technology and cutting edge devices so that even the most tech illiterate can understand what’s going on with their computer or gadget — and what to do when something goes wrong.
