Thief! What to do if your computer is Stolen

Number 1. Call the Police! Obviously!

Number 2. Give them your Serial Number for your computer.

Number 3. Sit down and have a good cry.

Actually, I wouldn't know what the right thing to do is, but I can certainly tell you what I did.

Monday afternoon my fiance came home from work to find a brick sitting outside our front door, the window smashed and the back door wide open and our flat trashed. Wonderful, Burglars, and us with no Insurance. M&^%$r F*&^&r !

Without going into the specifics, and putting aside the feelings of our personal space being heinously violated by a pair of opportunistic tip rat thieving C*&#s, we have learned a few lessons about security this week. 

While Apple apparently used to maintain a database of stolen Mac's I've learned they no longer do. While there isn't a hell of a lot you can do to protect your laptop after it is stolen, there are things you can do before hand. Windows systems apparently have a number of programs, but for Macs the best thing I have read in numerous forums in the last 4 days is Undercover.

Because laptops are increasingly popular, and desktops are becoming smaller and more portable, computer theft has reached huge proportions worldwide. According to a recent FBI report, 97% of all stolen computers are never recovered. Many people we know have had their Macs stolen, often in 'safe' situations. That's why we developed Undercover: a unique theft-recovery application designed from the ground up for Mac OS X. 

What it does? A number of things, including tracking it, taking photos of whose using it, making it behave erratically and enabling you to remotely kill it in a matter of speaking.

I wish I had have known about this program before, however, I also wish my laptop wasnt stolen either, and before it was stolen, it never actually entered my head that it might one day be stolen. So, that ends that sentence. My next laptop will definitely have a copy of this software on it.

What else can you do to protect your computer from thieves?

Disable Automatic Login. 

Secure it with a Lock.

Secure your home.

Take out personal contents insurance.

or the obvious. Take your laptop with you everywhere you go. But even thats not fool proof.