If my laptop is ever stolen,say a burglary from my house,what is the first thing I do,after I inform the police of course. I am insured through ordinary household insurance,but do I let my ISP know straight away ? Can they use my computer themselves ?I am with dial up service.(Pay as you go)

The laptop can be used by others, but they would most likely reformat it and sell it.

Most household insurance would cover a laptop, but only inside your home unless you have extended cover. It doesn't work out to be much extra to add this on, and would cover your other belongings outside the home too!

Hope this helps.

K x

They can use the laptop, yes. What you need to be concerned about is any documents or important/confidential emails that might be on the laptop.

Windows comes with basic password protection but it can be bypassed by people up to no good.

Andy makes a good point there. It might be prudent to back up any important files to disk and keep them seperately. :)

If you can, set up a password and user name on teh laptop. XP, NT and Windows 2000 are such that if you do that the best that people can do is log in as 'Guest' - and get restricted access to your files - or reformate the hard disc.

They COULD get access to data on the disc if they were really determined, but if teh computer's been stolen by a lowlife looking for money for a fix then they'll be more interested in selling it than reading it.

Contact your ISP and tell them your PC has been stolen, or use another PC, log in and change your password.

Joe

Thanks very much for all your advice.I never take my laptop out of the house but I was reading that burglars dont bother now with t.v. or videos,as they are so cheap to buy,but they always take computers especially laptops. I would inform my ISP straight away,thank you again.I dont have any personal info stored on it,but I wondered if they could use it to go on the internet.

Why not invest in a service such as Datatag (www.datatag.co.uk). MIght not protect your data, but increases the chance of recovery, my bike, and my computers are all datatagged.

With dial up, chances are, if they dial up using your connection, it'll be them getting charged anyway. If you contact the isp, they should be able to suspend your account, and log the number of where its been dialed from, for the police.

Unless of course you have an apple, with the open firmware password, there is no way they can get into your data, without having reset, which can only be done at an apple store, and they check your identity before they unlock it. And people say apple are silly......

Joel

Originally posted by pattricia
I wondered if they could use it to go on the internet.

Not really worth worrying about too much as anyone can get themselves a pay as you go dial up account from loads of places. I've got a couple of accounts on the laptops for when I'm working away from the office, one of which requires no setup information or signing up to a service of any variety.

why not encrypt the hard drive with somethiung like www pgp dot com.
It wont retreive your laptop but it will render it useless without the passphrase

I do beleive it is still free

As much as I love PGP (or GPG free alternative) at $199 (Roughly £100) for the whole set of Windows utilities, Its a bit steep for your odd letter to mum or dad etc. Just make sure you have regular backups of your files, and you'll be fine. Most of the time the laptop will just be wiped and sold on, Most personal data is pretty useless (unless your storing CC info, and stuff like that, in which case you deserve a slap :P ). Any sensitive documents you write, burn to a CD/ drop on a floppy, or a USB flash drive and delete from the hard drive.

Joel

why not just back up your files.
then if it gets nicked there's no need to get stressed.if its PAYG dial up there's little they can access anyway & if it's password protected like it should be no problemo.

u could probably buy it back on ebay a couple of days later anyway.(lol)

Its the thing most people never do, one of those "Oh I'll do it tomorrow" jobs. They never get done, untill its too late. The amount of people I've said backup your files to, and then they've had a hard drive faliure, and they want to know if I can rescue $DATA from it.

Rember kids, backup, or the gremlins will come and eat your data

Joel

Have a look at this site.. quite new in the market place and very cheap.

www.deadmanshandle.com

Originally posted by Kristian
Andy makes a good point there. It might be prudent to back up any important files to disk and keep them seperately. :)

Has anyone heard of BT Datasure? Just thought I would mention it here whilst we are on topic. Looks rather good..... Off site data back up... through your BBand. Good old british brand name (major player) with a Customer Service Guarentee Scheme should "anything go wrong"

http://www.bt.com/business/demo/datasure/

Originally posted by bigflesh
Has anyone heard of BT Datasure? Just thought I would mention it here whilst we are on topic. Looks rather good..... Off site data back up... through your BBand. Good old british brand name (major player) with a Customer Service Guarentee Scheme should "anything go wrong"

http://www.bt.com/business/demo/datasure/

BT, Customer Service exscuse me while I wipe the drink off the screen i just spat out..

Joel

Originally posted by bigflesh
Good old british brand name (major player) with a Customer Service Guarentee Scheme should "anything go wrong"


Er, yeah, well. Think I'd rather just buy an external USB drive ta. :wink:

Well there is insurance and apparently Compucover (www.compucover.co.uk) is supposed to pay out VERY quickly; I was told within a few days. BUT they only insure kit within the first 3 months from the purchase date. There are also various security methods for locking access to all of the data on the hard drive, eg thumb recognition etc. As it seems quite probable that laptops will be lost or stolen, and IF you rely on it then such measures are a very small price for that peace of mind.

off course they can use it. The best way is to add a BIOS password

Not read all the thread so I might be repeating something already said but most laptops will let you set hard disk, power on and bios passwords and quite a few have additional security. Quite a few Fujitsu Siemens Lifebooks have a row of numbers above the keyboard which act like a combination lock once set.

Surely the easiest thing to do is hide it away when you're not using it? If you do leave it out, use a security cable to fasten it to something big and solid.