What do you do when your phone, tablet or laptop are lost or stolen?
Here is a completely unexpected demo of "Prey", a program you install on you mobile devices before they get lost. There is a short intro as Michael reads some "unfounded" police reports. Then I skip to the fun part.
How to Recover a Lost or Stolen Laptop, Tablet or Phone
It is bad enough when someone gets their hands on all your photos and personal data, but when they have your device, it's even worse. What? you didn't make a backup?If you do nothing else, at least prepare you device for the worst possible thing that can happen! It ends up in the hands of someone else!
Install "Prey" on your smart phone and portable devices.Do it before they go missing. It will not work if you don't install it before it is lost.
- Prey is Free for up to three devices.
- You don't get charged anything to track you device when it is lost.
- It does not slow down you PC or tablet. It doesn't even show up, so a thief can't easily remove it.
- If your device goes missing, just log into the Prey website(https://preyproject.com/) and mark the device as missing.
This will take less than ten minutes to set this up. Once installed it does not slow down your device or even show up on the device. In fact. it does NOTHING until after it is lost and you report the loss by marking it as missing.
The people at PreyProject.com did a great job with this app. Did you lose the receipt for your laptop? Fail to record the serial number? Forget the model number? The web site will get all that from the device, everything you need to file a police report. Once you mark your device as missing, and the person who has it turns it on, it will even take a screen capture and a photo every 10 minutes so you can see what they were doing and who did it.
Three steps to securing your stuff.

On your home computer, go to preyproject.com and set up an account.
Make a paper note of the email account and password. Use the same email and password on the devices when you set then up in the next step.
STEP 2
Go to the Prey Download page and follow the instructions to install the client on each of your portable devices.
Install the client on your devices

Go to Devices tab and view the list of your devices
You are done setting up your devices.
If one of your devices is lost log into the Prey website, go to the Device tab and click on the device that is missing. Shown here on the left is where you set the device missing. You can also lock the device, set an alarm or display a reward message.
You should really play with this a little to get familiar with how it works and make sure you did the client installs correctly.