Have you ever had a notebook computer stolen? If not, it’s probably that you — like I — have just been lucky up to now. So here’s a product that’s making the press-release-oriented website rounds that sounds pretty useful. It’s called LoJack for Laptops.

You can buy a subscription for both Windows and Mac machines.

Here’s how it apparently works. You load it as just another software application. When the computer has Internet access, it contacts a monitoring center at Absolute Software Corp., the company that sells the service, in the background. If the laptop gets ripped off, you file a police report and notify Absolute’s recovery team. Absolute puts the signal from your computer on “high alert” so that the recovery team can identify its location as quickly as possible. That information is transmitted to the police agency handling the theft, along with document for getting a search warrant, and presumably goes about recovering the computer.

If you’re giving a new notebook to a student, this might not be a bad sub-$50 program to throw on there. But do some price grabbing. Looks like you can get good deals on multi-year subscriptions with a bit of keyboard work.

Posted on December 24th, 2007 by dian