Track your stolen P.C.

We all know that the various smartphones have various applications that allow you to track your phone when it is lost or stolen. Smartphone users have applications such as  GPS Tracking Pro and Track My Droid and  Lookout to track their phones whenever they are lost, stolen or even just misplaced.

After various persistent cases of thefts of laptops at the university I am currently in, I started wondering if they are any applications out there that I can use to track my laptop if it were stolen.

 That is when I came across Prey.

Prey allows you to remotely monitor your stolen laptop, retrieving screenshots, webcam pictures, and Wi-Fi hotspot information that you can use to track down your laptop. It is quite easy to use as I'll show you below.

1. Make a guest account/Non-administrator account
In Windows, Prey runs as a service. Unfortunately, that means that its tracking abilities will only kick in when a thief logs into a user account on your computer. So the thief has to be able to log into an account. You’ve got two options: First, you could remove the password from your primary account but hat leaves your data exposed, so we recommend the second option, creating a password-unprotected guest account.Creating a guest account is easy,just open the Start Menu, then right-click Computer and select Manage. In the Local Users and Groups tab you can right-click and create a new account

2. Install Prey to your guest account

Now, log in to your new guest account, and download the Prey installer from www.preyproject.com. Run the installer, and when you get to the end, choose to configure Prey now. The first thing you’ll need to decide is how you want to manage Prey . You can choose to use the online control panel, or to set it up in stand-alone mode. . Select the control panel method and you’ll be asked to create an account.

Do not forget to set your computer to automatically  connect to in-range Wi-Fi hotspots so as to enable Prey to send reports even if the thief does not intend to connect to the internet.

That is it.  So, if your laptop gets stopen or you just want to test if prey actually works just log in to the control panel and have a look around. In the control panel at Preyproject.com, there are a number of reporting options you can set, but the most important is at the top, marked Missing. If your laptop is stolen, toggle this option as soon as possible to tell Prey to start sending reports. You can also increase the frequency of sent reports, but the free version of Prey stores only 10 reports at a time, so if you’re not going to be able to retrieve the reports over a few hours, you might want to set a longer interval. Beyond that, all the options are pretty straightforward—they allow you to keep track of networking and geolocation information , so you can find your laptop, and to track webcam activity and which programs the thief uses.