LoJack Deals with Stolen Notebook Computers

According to some statistics, more than 600,000 notebook computers were stolen last year in the US. Until recently, any hope of ever getting one’s notebook back was slim to none. But a company called Absolute Software has produced a product called LoJack which provides an ingenious way to track the movement of a stolen notebook. Once installed, all the owner has to do is register the product, then if his notebook is stolen, he calls both the police and Absolute software. The way it works, LoJack will silently broadcast its IP address back to the Absolute Software company whenever it is plugged into a network, and Absolute Software always knows when the notebook is moved to a different location. The registered MAC address (all computers have a unique MAC address) will always pass unless it is reported stolen. But if the notebook is stolen, Absolute will red-flag the MAC address and Absolute can now trace the computer to whatever network IP address the thief has plugged it into. Then it’s just a matter of the police tracing the notebook back to the network IP address. The company has made the product so invisible that even a reformat of the computer cannot erase the utility, as it installs itself onto a hidden partition and is very difficult to detect or uninstall without the correct pass codes. According to their website, notebooks running the LoJack product have a 90% recovery rate.

It used to be that watching the evolution of computers meant watching the CPU clock speeds getting faster, watching the RAM and Hard-disk size and speeds getting bigger, and the video cards getting better and better. Clock speed seems to be getting less important as we start to see Dual Core chips appearing on the landscape. Dual Core chips will take over from the dual CPU motherboard market, as the new design has two microprocessors pressed into a single package. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), arch-rival to Intel, has produced a Dual Core chip with a clock speed of only 2.2 Ghz which outperforms the equivalent Intel Dual Core chip, even though the Intel product runs at a much speedier 3.2 Ghz clock speed, according to benchmarking tests performed by Maximum PC magazine. Intel, once the undisputed leader in CPU and chipset manufacturing for home and office computers, must be getting worried; AMD has now captured roughly half the world CPU market for personal computers.

Mozilla Firefox, a web-browser alternative to Internet Explorer, has risen to second place as the most popular web-browser in the world, capturing 8.65% of the world market. Microsoft probably isn’t getting worried yet, as they still own 85%. Other browsers include Netscape (once the dominant browser) and Opera. It’s not a bad idea to use one of these free browsers instead of Explorer as your primary browser, because Explorer is notoriously susceptible to security attacks, allowing Spyware infections and other troubles. The reason is VBScripts (written in MS Visual Basic) and MS ActiveX controls, which are widely exploited by those who actually write spyware programs. Firefox, Netscape and Opera don’t use these languages, and therefore are less susceptible to spyware infections. But Internet Explorer is still the only browser that will work on some sites, so go ahead and delete the shortcut on your desktop, but you will still need Explorer for some web tasks.