Hey, so I have a Thinkpad that I use in a variety of places (coffee shops, work, etc.). I don't generally abandon it, but I figure there's a chance I might get careless and it gets stolen at some point.
I was thinking of installing something like Prey (http://preyproject.com/), but my OS installs are password secured, and on top of that, I have a fingerprint reader that you need just to get through the BIOS. So: is there actually any benefit to setting up software that tracks the laptop's whereabouts? I imagine that either:
- The laptop won't boot or login, if the thief doesn't get past the security.
- If the thief goes around said security somehow, presumably they've split the laptop for parts or bypassed BIOS security, gotten stuck on Windows security and formatted it.
Given that it's highly unlikely that the thief would go to the trouble, what's the utility in installing laptop tracking software like Prey?
Answer
Your "problem" is that your machine is secured too well.
Theft tracking software counts on the thief being able to use your machine, at least a short amount of time. If you use BIOS passwords etc., there's just no way to do that -- you'll get very little value out of any such software.
I use a theft tracking software on my Mac OS X laptop.
My personal home directory with all my data is encrypted and my user account password protected, and I've made sure to create a few (low-privilege) user accounts with very weak passwords (mostly clean accounts I use e.g. for doing presentations), as well as activated the guest account.
They can't access my data, but I want them to use my machine e.g. for web browsing! Only with network access, theft tracking will work, and I'll have a chance at being able to recover my machine.
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