Gone forever? It might be. But in case the thief does not immediately formats the hard-disk but instead uses the laptop or PC anywhere it’s connected to the internet, there’s a number of services that actually track and locate your stolen equipment, using IP addresses and more. There’s LocateMyLaptop, LocateLaptop, and so on (read the WikiPedia article on this). Trouble with all these, is that they are subscription (and European/US) based.

For some time though, there’s been a free alternative; giving you all the functionality of the above minus the dedicated detective and automatic notification of the police. Living in Tanzania though, these services are not available to us anyway, so why not try ‘Prey’, the free, Open Source application available to Windows, Mac and Linux users that installs once and then runs quietly in the background, until it’s needed.

The Prey website

If that day arrives, your laptop or desktop computer has gone missing, all you have to do is enter your Prey Control Panel and set it’s status to ‘Missing’. From then on, every time the PC or laptop has an active internet connection (and Prey will actively search for open WiFi connections so no user interaction is needed), it’ll gather evidence which will be available to you, most importantly:

• The computers IP address, leading you to the ISP and possible internet cafe in question
• If your computer has a web-cam built in, you’ll be able to actually see the thief!

The prey control panel, where you can mark your equipment as missing

All of this info, and more, available to you from your control panel, or sent to you by email. Armed with the (approximate) location of your pc and hopefully a nice clear mugshot (picture) of the thief, off to the polici!

NOTE: Almost left out the other free, Open Source solution, doing roughly the same as Prey but just a tad less polished: Adeona…

Simply put, the authors took hundreds of freely available solutions and put them together with a simple bootable menu. Download the ISO, burn it onto a CD/R and take it with you wherever you go.
To quote from their website, you need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to:

• Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.
• Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.
• Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn’t you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!
• New! Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version.

When you boot up from the CD, a text-based menu will be displayed, and you will be able to select the tool you want to run. The selected tool actually boots off a virtual floppy disk created in memory.

Interested? Read more on the Ultimate Boot CD website, download the image for yourself or come to our shop and get your own copy!

For this reason, we’ve opened up a new category on our site, ‘Technicians Toolkit’, under which you’ll find articles, tips and tricks helping us (and you), Arusha ICT technicians, with our daily work. All solutions and tools listed are free to use, copy and share amongst your friends. And because we know from painful experience how long it can take to download a CD image using our flaky Tanzanian internet, all of the tools mentioned are available for free from our shop! Just drop by with a memory stick or empty CD and we’ll fill them up for you, free of charge…

To break the ice, click here for our first few articles in this category… and to make sure you never miss any updates, ensure you’re subscribed to the ‘Technicians Toolkit’ category of our update service!