I’m about to buy a laptop for uni and my single largest concern is theft.
I’m in a bit of a difficult position because the desktop I’m on at the moment is nearly 6 years old and it’s not practical to upgrade anymore. With this in mind I was going to spend a reasonably large amount on a laptop so that it could also be a gaming platform for me whilst at uni. But that just makes the risk and worry of theft even higher.
After doing a bit of research I found about laptop tracking, so that in the event of theft my personal documents could be nuked and hopefully the laptop be returned. There is one service that seems by far the best around and that’s Absolute’s Lojack for laptops http://www.absolute.com/ because it’s installed bios-level and can survive a reformat or even hard-drive replacement. But unfortunately it’s only available to government or corporate licensing in the UK, so consumers are out of luck.
So I’m currently looking for a service that is UK based, the only one I could find is BackStopp http://backstopp.com/ but again they don’t seem very ‘consumer’ friendly, I’m going to contact them later today to find out if they’ll allow a consumer to buy a single licence but it doesn’t look promising. It also seems entirely software based so a reformat may render it useless.
So my question is; does anybody know of any solution based in the UK that I may be able to use? Preferably one that can survive a reformat, but then I doubt its likely anyone other than Computrace has managed to convince manufacturers to install their client on the bios. I’m also secretly hoping that if my laptop were swiped, it’d be by another student and perhaps they’d be too thick to reformat.
Has anyone had any experience with a similar service? My primary concern is hardware recovery rather than data encryption because anything important will be on a pgp usb stick anyway. Does anyone have any other ideas on what I can do to protect myself?
I’m in a bit of a difficult position because the desktop I’m on at the moment is nearly 6 years old and it’s not practical to upgrade anymore. With this in mind I was going to spend a reasonably large amount on a laptop so that it could also be a gaming platform for me whilst at uni. But that just makes the risk and worry of theft even higher.
After doing a bit of research I found about laptop tracking, so that in the event of theft my personal documents could be nuked and hopefully the laptop be returned. There is one service that seems by far the best around and that’s Absolute’s Lojack for laptops http://www.absolute.com/ because it’s installed bios-level and can survive a reformat or even hard-drive replacement. But unfortunately it’s only available to government or corporate licensing in the UK, so consumers are out of luck.
So I’m currently looking for a service that is UK based, the only one I could find is BackStopp http://backstopp.com/ but again they don’t seem very ‘consumer’ friendly, I’m going to contact them later today to find out if they’ll allow a consumer to buy a single licence but it doesn’t look promising. It also seems entirely software based so a reformat may render it useless.
So my question is; does anybody know of any solution based in the UK that I may be able to use? Preferably one that can survive a reformat, but then I doubt its likely anyone other than Computrace has managed to convince manufacturers to install their client on the bios. I’m also secretly hoping that if my laptop were swiped, it’d be by another student and perhaps they’d be too thick to reformat.
Has anyone had any experience with a similar service? My primary concern is hardware recovery rather than data encryption because anything important will be on a pgp usb stick anyway. Does anyone have any other ideas on what I can do to protect myself?
