Having two working laptops in our house, one of which gets carried around by me quite frequently, I have often worried what I’d do if one of them ends up getting stolen. It happens all the time. I’ve thought of LoJack, but my fears, I guess, just don’t justify the cost.
This is rather cool. Over at TechRepublic, I learned of an open source (read – FREE) software program for Windows, Mac and Linux called “Prey”
The software puts you firmly in the “big brother” seat in the even your laptop is ever stolen. I would assume it would work just as well on a desktop, I don’t know.
Once you install Prey, it will send an email to a email address you specify,in a time interval you specify…say…every 3 minutes,or 10 minutes, or 1 hour. The email will contain information like:
- Computer status
- List of currently running programs
- Network (including Wi-Fi) information
- A screen shot of the desktop
- A picture of the thief (if your laptop has a webcam)
Now, I know what your thinking “Gee, that’s cool, but I don’t wanna fill up my email box when the laptop isn’t stolen.” Well, the folks that created Prey thought of that too. When you setup and configure Prey, you can set it to check a specific URL. If it finds that, it will send the data to the specified email address.
I’m going to download and install this on my laptop this evening, I’ll add a post in the next day or two about the experience. The URL can be a specific web page, something like, say “http:myownhometown.blogspot.com/stolenlappy.htm”. Something you can create as soon as the laptop goes missing.
