Laptop Cop

Laptops are designed to be carried about but this portability will always make them vulnerable to spontaneous theft. Anything, therefore, that can be done to make your laptop and its data recoverable sounds like a good idea to us.

Laptop Cop isn’t something you can buy and use after the event – if you want to protect your PC, you’ll have to buy and install it now. The software works by assuming that the thieves will turn your laptop on and start using it without wiping the hard disk first, which is actually quite likely because they may want to find passwords and bank details.

Once the software is installed, it tracks the laptop whenever somebody using it logs in to a Wi-Fi network. This is spooky stuff – it showed our location to within a few metres as we moved in and around London during testing. You can also request files from it, request files to be deleted from it and report it stolen, so its movements can be tracked. Anything typed on the machine is recorded.
However, our security software (we were running) caught the keylogging software, so there’s a chance that someone stealing your PC might be able to work out that there’s tracing software installed on it.

While it offers no guarantees, Laptop Cop dramatically increases your chances of retrieving data from a lost PC. The best thing about it is the location tracking, which blew us away. Who knows? It might even get your laptop back and bring the thief to justice.