Thousands of laptops are lost or stolen each year. People leave them in taxis, trains, hotels and coffee shops, and they’re a prime target by thieves as well. Put your laptop bag down for a minute and a thief might snatch it when you aren’t looking, and a laptop left on your car seat is a huge temptation for opportunistic thieves.

Of course, you stand to lose more than just the hardware. The thief or finder could access personal files and information and even steal your identity.

See also: How to protect your smartphone, tablet, laptop and other tech kit

There is little chance of recovering a lost or stolen laptop unless you take precautions. It’s good practice to make a record of any serial numbers printed on the case that can help identify it. This information can be passed on to the police, lost and found departments at train stations, or wherever you last remember having it. Having this extra information should speed up your laptop’s return if it turns up.

You should also mark it. UV pens cost very little and if the police recover a laptop they check it with a UV lamp when trying to locate the owner. An alternative is etching or sticky labels that when attached to a computer or other device, are nearly impossible to remove. A thief will find it hard to sell on a laptop that has a tough label super-glued to the case proclaiming your ownership. Companies such as Selectamark specialise in this sort of thing.

Another step to take is to encrypt your files. Encryption software can be used to hide important files or lock your entire hard drive. TrueCrypt is free and open source, and there are many commercial encryption tools too.

See also: Encrypt files the easy way using Cryptainer LE

Laptop tracking software

Laptop tracking software, however, is one method you can use to actively try and find out where your missing laptop has got to. It’s the equivalent of Apple’s Find My iPhone, and it’s well worth investing in some software if you regularly travel with your laptop.

Also known as laptop recovery software, it reports the laptop's location every day or even every few minutes, as long as it’s connected to the internet. It may take screen shots of the desktop and photos of the user with the laptop's webcam. This information can be used by the police to recover your computer.

Tracking software can also remotely lock a laptop to stop someone using it, display messages on the screen, and even remotely erase the disk to prevent personal information being accessed by the thief.

Let's take a look at these services in more detail.

LoJack For Laptops

Manufacturer: Absolute Software

Price: £33.96 per year/1 device

Rating: 4/5

LoJack is available for Windows and Apple laptops, with an Android version promised soon. After registering with the website, which requires a credit card even for the 30-day free trial, a serial number is provided which then enables you to install the software. It hides itself on the disk and that's the last you'll see of it. The computer logs in with Absolute Software every so often and checks for instructions.

If the laptop is stolen you log in to the website using another computer and there are Locate, Lock, Delete and Recover options. Lock stops the laptop from being used and displays a message on the screen, such as your contact details to enable someone finding it to return it.

Delete, as you might expect, allows you to erase all user files leaving just the operating system, which prevents someone accessing personal information.

Recover lets you report the computer as stolen. You must report it to the police first, though. Absolute Software then starts gathering information about the laptop and works with the police to recover it.

LoJack sounds great, but you can’t test is as thoroughly as with some of the others and you won’t know whether it works until your laptop is stolen. It requires a leap of faith when purchasing the software and trusting that Absolute Software can recover it.

LoJack lets you remotely lock a laptop and display a custom message on the screen

Find My iPhone

Manufacturer: Apple

Price: Free/unlimited Apple devices

Rating: 3/5

You might assume from the name of this Apple utility that it is just for finding your iPhone, but this isn’t the case and you can also find iPads, iMac computers and MacBook laptops. Unfortunately, you cannot track Windows laptops, but you can use a Windows PC to find where your Apple laptops and gadgets are located.

To turn on the service on a MacBook, go to the Apple menu, select Preferences, iCloud and turn on Find My Mac. You can then use Find My iPhone on an iPhone or iPad or go to icloud.com any computer with an internet connection, including Windows PCs.

The locations of all your Apple devices are displayed on a map and you can select the one you want. There are options to play a sound (even if the volume is set to mute) and to lock the laptop with a PIN code and display a message on the screen.

You can even erase the hard drive completely. Find My Mac can be turned off as easily as it is turned on, but the thief may not know this and you could determine the location and send a lock command it before they realise what has happened.

Find out where your MacBook is and remotely lock it or erase the hard drive

Next page: Prey, Norton Anti-Theft and miTracker