LocatePC

As more and more individuals buy different computers, laptops and mobile devices, thieves realised this is easy money for them. Losing a personal computer or device really hurts, and can even impact your workplace if important documents were on that HDD. Luckily, developers came out with applications like LocatePC to keep you and your devices on the safe side.

Quick accommodation and initial setup

First of all, you need to go through the installer so the application can integrate itself in your system. When it runs, some basic configurations need to be done. These don’t take up a lot of time, and even if you decide to skip it initially, you still have to configure it for stuff to properly work.
So what the application does is monitor your computer and every connection it establishes with the information superhighway, and sends you an email so you know when this happened. As such, you need to provide an address for the emails to go to, as well as a place to send them from, and this needs to be done with a SMTP server.
Moreover, you can write down a custom mail message to receive, so you know exactly what happened. A schedule needs to be set, and there are two options in this regard. You can either have the application send messages every specific number of days, or whenever the PC’s IP address changes.

Far from being a pro

The application only shows its face the first time you run it so that configurations can be done. In the rest of the time, it’s only active as a process, and even if someone attempts to close it, a password prompt appears.
However, it’s not all fun and games, with the application being a bit far from making sure you find the computer you lost. This is because some more Windows and even BIOS settings need to be changed accordingly, such as no password requirement for reaching the desktop, or disabling any extra boot options for external devices.

To end with

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that LocatePC comes with good intentions but is a bit under-prepared for modern IT threats. Sure enough your inbox becomes full of emails for every IP address that’s attributed to a PC, and given the dynamic IP technology, this happens a lot. In any case, you’re best off looking for alternatives if you want to stand a better chance at outsmarting thieves.