Review: 6 Ways to Find Your Stolen Laptop

Think quick; where's your laptop right now? I bet you felt just a little twinge of worry until you remembered its location, right? Imagine how you'd feel if it was lost, misplaced, or stolen. How would you get it (and your data) back? How could you keep a thief from making evil use of private or corporate data stored on the laptop? We've rounded up a half-dozen products that aim to put your mind at ease.
A laptop antitheft product should keep your data safe, and keep strangers from using the computer. It should protect your private data and resist a thief's attempts to disable its protection. On a laptop that's merely lost, it should create a communication avenue for an honest finder to arrange the laptop's return. And of course, if the laptop has truly been stolen it should help you recover it. Different products emphasize different goals. Here's how they stack up.

Location, Location, Location

When you can't find your laptop, the first thing you want to know is its current location. Most antitheft products use WiFi lookup to determine the laptop's geolocation. They check nearby WiFi hotspots against a database, typically Google's or Skyhook's, to find out where the laptop is.

It's also possible to roughly determine the device's location based on the IP address of the network to which it's connected. IP-based geolocation doesn't have nearly the accuracy of the WiFi-based technology, though. Where WiFi can locate the device within a city block or better, simple IP geolocation can be off by miles.

Snuko Anti-Theft & Data Recovery Premium ($29.95/year direct, 2.5 stars) uses IP as a fallback if it can't obtain a location using WiFi. That fallback proved important in testing, because at present Snuko's WiFi geolocation isn't fully functional on some XP-based systems. LoJack for Laptops by Absolute Software ($39.99/year direct, 4.5 stars) uses only IP-based geolocation, meaning you can probably determine what city the laptop is in, but not much more. WiFi geolocation comes as part of LoJack's premium package, which costs $20 more.

If you're at all concerned about privacy, you'll probably decide you don't want the laptop maintaining a history of everywhere you go. You can protect your privacy by turning off the geolocation history until and unless the laptop goes missing. GadgetTrak Laptop Security ($34.95/year direct, 3 stars) offers a nice compromise. You can set it to display just the latest known location, without keeping a history. That way you'll know a thief's current location even before you remotely enable location history.

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Stealth or Scare Tactics

Laptop Cop ($65 direct, 4 stars) and LoJack install in stealth mode, deliberately hiding their processes and leaving no visible evidence of their presence. Their aim is to covertly gather information about the thief without letting him know he's under observation.

LaptopSentry 3.1 ($9.99 direct, 2.5 stars) and Laptop Superhero ($29.99/year direct, 2.5 stars) take quite the opposite approach. LaptopSentry sounds a loud alarm if a locked-but-running laptop is disconnected from its power cord. Laptop Superhero sounds a loud, whooping alarm when the owner remotely sends it a lockdown command.
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