Well, in the vernacular one would say “this really sucks!” And indeed it does: both my son and his college roommate suffered the theft of their laptop computers when a thief forced a window and broke into their student housing apartment in Los Angeles. The LAPD was great about it, taking a full report, even dusting for fingerprints. But still, the chance of recovery is almost nil.

My son’s computer held no mission critical or sensitive information. For that we are thankful. But still, it was a fairly new MacBook. His roomate’s was only a few weeks old. Arrgh! Here’s the advice I should have given them, though whether they would have followed it is another issue:

1. When you’re gone, lock your laptops to a solid object using a cable.

2. Prep your machine to increase the chance of recovery. You can set up your machine to require a login password. You may even be able to set a password at the firmware level, which would help preventing someone from booting your machine from an external disk, or from a newly intalled hard drive. See this Apple article about setting it up on a Macintosh computer. Make a careful note of your new firmware password; your machine will need major surgery if you forget it.

And here’s a clever idea from Macworld magazine: change the login window wallpaper to have your name & zip code on it. If the machine is taken to a repair center, sold or recovered, the user will be able to see who it belongs to when the login screen come up. Here’s how:
1. Goto Library>Desktop Pictures & make a duplicate of Aqua Blue.jpg
2. Now open the original in Photoshop or an equivalent and insert some text at the top and/or bottom that will say who owns the computer E.G. “This computer belong to Joe Bloggs. 91730”
3. Save it and change the wallpaper in Preferences to Aqua Blue copy.jpg or some other if you don’t want the message displayed once you have logged in.

I just learned that there are several “Lo Jack” style products available for computers. On machines that have built in cameras, the software can actually snap photos of the thief and send them to the authorities once he/she logs into the internet! In addition the software will send ip address information to help track down the physical location of your machine. This software might be a good investment on certain high risk desktop machines too!

Here is one such program for Macs and another for both Windows and Mac.

Finally a wikipedia article that outlines the enormity of computer theft. We should all take it seriously.