By special arrangement, links to the service are contained in the BIOS chips of Hewlett-Packard Co., Gateway Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Dell Inc., and Fujitsu Ltd. laptops, so that even reinstalling the operating system will not stop the machines from reporting in, Jickling said. Pricing for the full Computrace service starts at US$128.95 per unit for three years. The consumer version of the service is a boxed product called LoJack for Laptops, priced at $49.99 for one year.

Meanwhile, CyberAngel Security Solutions Inc. in Nashville depends on a combination of encryption and tracking. The CyberAngel system creates an encrypted partition on the hard drive, and anyone who boots the system but gives the wrong password will be able to use the machine, but will not see the encrypted partition, said CyberAngel spokesman Bradley Lide. While the unsuspecting thief happily uses the machine, in the background, the laptop will start sending out tracking pings.

"We got the CyberAngel service when we first started getting laptops two years ago and have needed it twice," said Jodea Johnson, systems administrator at Douglas County Hospital in Alexandria, Minn. She chose the service because she liked the encryption it offered, plus the fact that a thief would not know it is there. Also, the price seemed right, she recalled. A CyberAngel spokesman said the price is $59.95 for one year in single quantities, or $62.60 for a three-year license in the 100-to-500-quantity range.)

It took about six weeks before the first missing laptop started transmitting and the police could recover it, while the second one took less than a week, she recalled.

Laptop hijinks