Thomas Schuetz, president of MDx Medical Management Inc., a medical management consulting firm in Windsor, N.Y., said he signed up for the Computrace service in November 2005 to keep track of the 20 laptops his firm uses. Two months later, one of them, his own, went missing.

"I sent the Computrace people a copy of the police report, but the machine did not start polling the Internet until the end of March, from a location in Florida," Schuetz recalled.

"The recovery team contacted me in early April. They had tracked it on to Yonkers and then to downtown Manhattan, where it settled into one IP address, a person's home. They were able to watch what was being done with the laptop, and asked me if I knew that person. They offered to erase the hard disk remotely, but I would have had to reconstruct certain things, so I said no.

"After it was seized, I went to the precinct headquarters to pick it up, and everything was intact," he added. The person from whom the laptop was recovered now faces charges of possessing stolen property.

"The service would be worth twice what it costs us, and we recommend to our doctor clients that they get this service," he said.