"Well the idea was pretty simple. It was to put a piece of software on a computer and then have it call back to a dedicated monitoring station. And then if the unit was actually stolen, the person calls in with their serial number, tells us which unit they have, reports it stolen. And then we work with law enforcement to tack that particular unit down for them and recover it or delete the data on it if it's in a location where it can't be recovered."
Instead of using radio signals the way LoJack does in cars, Computrace sends a silent signaling to a monitoring center…when the laptop is connected to the Internet. And, says Livingston…stopping it isn't so simple…
"We do survive a reformat of the hard drive. So it's a fairly clever piece of software that sits just underneath the Microosoft operating system and is also able to resist a reinstallation of the operating system.."
The price, about fifty dollars a year. Some laptop makers…including Lenovo…which purchased IBM's PC business….are building the software in, some others sell it as an option.