Here is an easy and cheap way to recover your laptop if it was ever stolen and if you did not want to pay for a laptop lojack service. Such services cost about $50/year and they guarantee recovery of your laptop, remote hard drive deletion and sometimes up to $1000 if the laptop cannot be recovered. The problem I have with it is that you may end up spending $50/year and never lose your laptop just because you may never use it outside of your home.

So what is the dirt cheapest way to recover a laptop if it was ever stolen? If the thief does not erase the hard drive before connecting the laptop to the Internet, then a free dynamic DNS client may just do the trick. http://www.no-ip.com and http://www.dyndns.com offer free dynamic DNS services. You can create a free account and download one of the many free DNS clients whose purpose is to send and update the current IP address of your computer to the free dynamic DNS service. Such services are often used to host web services or remote back onto home computers.

If your laptop were to be stolen and connected to the Internet, the DNS client would immediately send the laptop IP to the DNS service. The IP address can be used by authorities to locate and recover your laptop. Easy? Full proof? No, but it is probably the easiest way to get some useful information about your laptop location. You can always do better. You could use www.gotomypc.com to be able to remote back into your stolen PC and maybe turn the webcam on and take a picture of the thief, or look at documents the thief may have created or websites the thief may have gone to. Such information may lead to a face, a name or an address.

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