Once you select the drive and proceed, it will start the encryption process. This process is going to take so much time that you can easily leave your machine and go out to watch a movie! It took us around 3 hours to encrypt a 300 GB drive with just 15 GB of used space. Once the process is over, your hard drive is safe from theft. However, do not forget to use a strong password or to lock your machine while you go out.

When your laptop goes missing!

Laptops have become an integral part of mobility. Extremely important for employees who need to travel frequently while remaining in continual touch with their offices, laptops are seen to be used everywhere ? shopping malls, cafes, cars, etc. However, with the number of laptops increasing in organizations, the cases of notebook theft started to scale a new high. This made organizations worry a lot about the security of their data. Users keep a lot of corporate data on their laptops, and at times, this even resulted in targeted attacks.

When we first wrote about a laptop recovery solution six month back we got many responses from our readers. In fact, this has inspired us to write this story. Let's have a look at some such solutions that can help track not only your stolen notebook or smartphone but also the data inside. Before we drill deep into the solutions, it's important to understand the scenarios in which these solutions will be able to help you, and some of the issues surrounding the solutions.

LocateMyLaptop shows the location of the notebook on Google Maps along with the information like IP, ISP, etc.

Situations in which recovery solutions won't work
If the hard drive is formatted: If your laptop with a recovery solution installed in it goes missing, it needs to be connected to Internet at least once, to give the running agent on it a chance to send IP address and other information to you. But, if the thief formats the laptop's HDD without connecting it to Internet, you are just out of luck.

If users are password protected: Again, if all Windows login users of your laptop are password protected and you have a recovery solution very much on place, it is less likely that the solution will work. The thief won't be able to gain access to your system. A work around to this is to have a user with no password and restricted rights, and encrypt all your data with a good hard disk encryption solution (covered in previous section). However, this also means you are opening a security hole on your notebook.

Choose a laptop recovery partner carefully

One of the most talked about laptop recovery solutions is 'Adeona'. The solution is currently not working and its website claims 'the back-end service (OpenDHT on PlanetLab) is proving to be unreliable'. One reason could be that it being a free open source service, a lot of users from around the world have started using it and perhaps its owner, Washington University, didn't expect that much traffic. It's not known when Adeona will be back, worse there is a possibility that there could be users running Adeona, thinking they have a chance to retrieve their laptop back, if it gets lost.

LocatePC shows entire trace route information to user's email along with MAC address of the machine. On AseeTrax portal, you can view entire tracking information including external IP.

Just incase you are an Adeona user; do try to retrieve your laptop information, to see if it works. Plus do take some extra measures such as encrypting your critical data which is always useful.

Motion sensor solutions

Another good idea is to equip your laptop with a small motion detection alarm or an infrared transmitter device which will trigger an alarm if your laptop is taken 15-20 feet away. A solution like laptop alarm (www.syfer.nl) will trigger a loud alarm if your laptop's power cable is unplugged or an external mouse is removed or someone tries to shutdown your laptop.

The tag way

That old fashioned way of ID everything still makes sense. You can simply ID your laptop and in case it gets missing, there is a chance of getting it back. However, if it lands in the wrong hand, there are chances of misusing your contact details and other important information. This is where lost and found services like Zreturn (www.zreturn.com) and Bommerrangit (http://www.boomerangit.com) come to help. These give a tag with a service number on it and the tag will read, if the device is found, 'please return it to their portal'. Once a person goes to their website and types the serial number, the information found will be sent to you via email or IM. This means the person who has found your laptop will not have your contact information, thus ruling out the possibility of a blackmail. However, such cases should ideally be 'lost' and not 'stolen'.

For a large enterprise with a fleet of around 400-500 laptops, you can create your own tag and even create a small portal, which doesn't reveal company information. Also, when you go for recovering your laptop, it might be a good idea to take security personnel along.

Intel Anti-theft Technology

Intel Centrino 2 with vPro notebooks come with Intel AT (Anti-Theft) Technology. It has hardware detection mechanisms that can recognize if a notebook is stolen and even can disable access to the laptop. For instance, if there are excessive failed attempts to login to a laptop which exceeds the number of attempts specified by IT policy, or if laptop does not connect back to the central server with in the IT policy specified time, actions can be automatically triggered. In case, a laptop is stolen and next time the notebook is connected to the Internet, it will automatically disable access to notebook.