Is it possible to trace a laptop?

Question

my girlfriend lost her laptop and I was wondering if it were anyway possible to find it via the ip address or serial number or something if they go onlibe with it?

Answer 1

If you have access to a laptop which you believed to be hers - and assuming that the hard drive had not been completely cleared - you could probably find sufficient evidence to prove to yourselves that you had found the right machine. I suspect it unlikely that this would come anywhere near a legal proof.
The only thing which is retained would be the MAC address of integrated NIC on the motherboard. Even if you knew what that was - I doubt that you could prove it - and it will not be visible on-line.
If my works laptop were missing, but was used within my works network, then it's possible that it could be identified by network administrators - if they had previously reserved a particular IP for that MAC address.
Sorry - no good news...

Answer 2

Yes and no,

Generally apart from physical Serial numbers on the laptop, serial numbers are also stored on chips as well (most of the time the eprom that stores information for a security chip also stores unique data to that laptop such as a serial number). These numbers with a little bit of work can be modified.

Another thing unique to the laptop would be the MAC address of each Ethernet device, for example a LAN Port or Wireless card the laptop has will both have different MAC addresses, these are unique and are generally never the same (unless someone changes them).

The bad news here is depending on how clued the theif was really depends on your ability to locate the laptop; if it was me i would cut my losses but i would do a number of things first.

I am assuming windows xp or some form of Microsoft Windows OS was installed on it? This will have a unique serial number. I would ring up microsoft if you still have the origional certificates of ownership (your windows xp licence) and see if there is anything they can do for you, however i doubt they can do much.

If your girlfriend had dialup internet and if the thief try's to connect with that account, then that is a good way to trace them. Call up the ISP (if your gf had dialup) and have them keep an eye on the account, if the theif dials up they will be able to tell the phone line that they used to connect. They will most prob not give you these details out however this may help you and the police.

Stolen laptops are a real problem, in the future i advise you put a password on the laptop, this will stop a majority of theifs, although getting around the passwords are quote easy (however time consuming) in some cases. Also passwording the harddrive via the BIOS is a good idea (this will lock the hard drive making it unusable unless the correct password is entered on start up).

As mentioned in an earlier post there are a number of applications that run in the background that will try phone home (via phone, or when they have an internet connection)..

Answer 3

I suggest this service: http://www.goobypls.com/r/rd.asp?gid=538

It's a cheap service that works great! It could be used for a much deeper search. You can use it to get hold of different varieties of background reports, and in addition cell numbers, addresses and names.. you can get unlimited reports... I ran with this because I required to verify more numbers. You can get the name, other phone number, address history, relatives, and much more about anyone! The completly free reverse phone lookup generally doesn't provide anything interesting. To get interesting information, money will must be paid. The free searches don't provide considerably more than what may be found through the phone directory or personal information and they simply require your email to send spam. The reverse phone detective search tool does work, but you should use just the service that I posted above. The last thing you want to do, is pay for a service and find the numbers you want to lookup are not available in their directory.

The service that I reccomend doesn't have any kind of problem , you won't get any bad surprise! Trust it!

Answer 4

It does seem like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted now that your laptop has gone, but there is a program called Computrace from www.misco.co.uk that enables you to trace a missing laptop. This will survive formatting and reinstallation of an OS, any time the thief goes online with this program installed they can be traced. It has a 70% recovery rate compared to 1% without it fitted. !t costs about £30.00 with postage. If you are in the US you should be able to get one from www.tigerdirect.com. I hope this helps.

Answer 5

My husband once told me there's a program that you can download in case your laptop is ever stolen. Of course you have to do it before the laptop is stolen. He says it can track your laptop if someone uses it to get online.

Answer 6

Im sure the cia or something could do it, but i dont know of any local business that can

Answer 7

don't really know the answer to that one but i do know that i would be pissed