Techno Kyle

The rising numbers of Laptop users are greatly increasing and of course as the numbers increase thieves and snatchers also increase in numbers. If you’re an owner perhaps you need to think twice in adding another layer of security, a good option is to attach a gprs tracking device to keep a watchful eye of your laptop whenever and wherever you go. But if you can’t afford for a device like that then there’s no need to worry there’s a good solution in safeguarding your laptops from thieves and alike.

Although you feel secure that your laptop is in good place it’s a good practice to have an added layer of  security by having a tracker attached to your laptop. Although gprs is a great choice there’s always a chance that it will be removed by the perpetrator assuming that he/she’s smart enough that such technology is attached to the laptop. The sad part is that gprs trackers costs a lot depending on the features. But you can have the functionality fully free if you installed PREY.

Prey is a software with the capability of tracking your laptops once you installed it in your system. Although the limitation of the software is that there must be an internet connection to get the tracking activated it’s a good trade-off since most sites now have hotspots on internet connection. Once your laptop is lost, the software can auto-activate to nearest open wi-fi access. If you have any questions here’s what PREY says in its site.

Prey wakes up at a specified interval and checks a URL to see if it should gather the traces and send the report. If the URL exists, Prey will simply go to sleep again. Basically, that’s it.

However, there’s two ways to run Prey: synchronized with the web control panel or in a standalone fashion.

1. Prey + Control Panel

In this case, you manage your computer state and Prey’s configuration through a web page, which also keeps track of all reports sent by Prey from your device. This is the method we recommend for most users, since you don’t have to worry about the URL thingy and you can actually “talk” to Prey by triggering different behaviours.

2. Prey Standalone

In standalone mode, the report goes directly to your inbox but it’s up to you to generate the URL to activate Prey. In this case you don’t need to sign up in Prey but you’ll have to set up the different modules by hand if you want to tune things up. This is actually the way Prey worked before version 0.3 was released.

Of course, Prey needs to have an active Internet connection to send the information. If the computer isn’t connected, Prey will attempt to connect to the nearest open wifi access point available.

In Linux/Mac, Prey can (and should) be run as root so it doesn’t depend on an active user session to run, but only on a successful boot.