Hijacked hardware? Hope you have tracking software…

I see them in school every day – the kids who bring their own laptops to school. Some have netbooks, some have standard 14″++ laptops. The kids who take these computers from class to class to take notes, to work and browse the web in the library, to play games during lunch in the cafeteria. Needless to say, I’m one of them. Of course with so many of these notebook computers around, it’s easy for some random person to swipe one off your desk when you least expect it. Then what? You lose an expensive device, all your schoolwork, and, if you store personal *ahem* files on your notebook, login information and your pride.

So what do you do to prevent such a thing? Either don’t bring your laptop to school, keep an eye on your device at all times, or use a tracking software like Absolute Software’s LoJack, which I will talk about here. Basically, LoJack is a piece of software that can track a stolen laptop via the web, in the end notifying the police of its location. There’s a good chance you’ll get your laptop back using this software (from what I’ve heard, anyway.) LoJack supposedly sits in your computer’s BIOS as well. In other words it’s hard to remove (for better or worse.)

How it works is, when your laptop is stolen, you would call LoJack and let them know that you’ve been had. Later when the thief (or thieves) decide to update their Facebook statuses or surf random sites, LoJack’s Absolute Theft Recovery Team will “forensically mine” your computer to get a location. This information is then handed over to the police, who will go nab your computer from the thieves and bring it back to you. Sound good?

In addition, LoJack has a “Data Delete” service that can and will remotely delete files from the stolen notebook’s hard disk drive. All your “personal” private files can be trashed, which no doubt throws off the identity thieves.

There are two versions of LoJack available: Standard and Premium. A 1 year subscription of Premium costs $79.99 and gets you the Remote Data Delete service described above and a $1000 service guarantee if LoJack couldn’t delete or recover the notebook in question. Standard 1-year subscription omits those two features and is priced at $52.79. (Prices from Tigerdirect.ca.)

In the end, it’s software like this that would help a lot of people. I know three students who have lost their laptops this year and as far as I know they were not running tracking software (e.g. LoJack.) I haven’t lost my netbook yet but I’m probably gonna invest in tracking soon. Any readers here have any experience with LoJack?