Laptop Tracking / Lojack Software, for stolen and lost laptop recovery

I have been a member of these forums for a while now. Sometimes you have to take a break from certifications, and deal with real life.

A while ago at work several dozen laptops came up missing, and I thought to myself, how could a place this size lose laptops...the answer was obvious.

But it inspired me to write software that tracked lost or stolen laptops.

No this is not some shameless plug, but rather a request, from one techie to another.

Can you guys look at this, and give me brutal / honest / constructive feedback?

The site is: Laptop Locator

I developed it with a few simple goals in mind:

1 - Easy to use, so my non-tech family and friends can use it
2 - Free for personal use, sure I would love to make money, but why charge for personal use?
3 - Inexpensive for business use, why charge an arm and a leg, it just drives people away
4 - Effective, log in, see the details without waiting
5 - No hidden data, give the users the IP and a means to lookup the ISP
6 - Works without the user logging in
7 - Geo data, show on a map where the ISP is, because typically this is close to the machine (same city).
8 - Works 100% of the time (I admit I am still working on this)

So far, AirCards have given me the biggest headache, you can be in Michigan and the Aircard IP is registered in New York.

If anyone is interested, this whole thing was written in C# in Visual Studio 2008

Thanks
Bryan

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Comments

Hyper-Me

Considering it was written in Visual Studio im guessing it installs in Windows?

Without the use of an actual piece of hardware, I can't say it would be quite as good as the ones that use that.

Any computer theif that isnt a complete idiot is going to wipe the existing OS ASAP.

bcairns

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Considering it was written in Visual Studio im guessing it installs in Windows?

Without the use of an actual piece of hardware, I can't say it would be quite as good as the ones that use that.

Any computer theif that isnt a complete idiot is going to wipe the existing OS ASAP.

Yup windows only, but I am considering re-writting the client in C++ using the QT framework so it will run in native code on windows, mac, and linux...perhaps for version 2. The issue with that is obviously how the OS's treat things....on windows this runs as a service, on Linux and Mac it would need to run as a Deamon. So I would have the same code base but different wrappers for it.

Another cross platform issue is computer name, that is OS related too.

And formatting the drive is always an issue with this type of software. Without some type of internal GPS hardware working with an internal air card it is impossible to track if it is not on the internet or turned off.

I expect that future laptops will come with this type of equipment.