"Kill switches," meanwhile, are the weapons of choice, along with the encryption of Beachhead Solutions Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. When a machine using Beachhead's Lost Data Destruction service checks the server and sees that it has been stolen, it can commence erasing preselected files, overwriting them multiple times to preclude file recovery, said Jeff Rubin, Beachhead's vice president of marketing. It can also pull other preselected stunts, such as eternally rebooting.

If it can't get online, the machine can go through a checklist, such as noting that it hasn't been booted up in a while, decide whether it has been stolen and launch the same procedures, Rubin added. Single-user pricing is $129 per year.

"Tracking is a great idea if you are concerned about the hardware, but a $1,500 laptop is no big deal compared to the damaged reputation that could result from a breach," said Corey Jenrich, IT manager at Community Bank in Pasadena, Calif. He uses Beachhead for his bank's 80 machines. He has never had one stolen and so has never used the kill switch. In the meantime, Jenrich uses the automated encryption facilities that the Beachhead software offers.

"We could have just rolled out the Encrypting File System on Windows XP, but we thought it put too much reliance on the end user to put the right files in an encrypted folder, and if the laptop gets into the wild, I can't prove that a given file was encrypted," he said.

With Beachhead, all files with user-specified extensions will be encrypted. Jenrich also said he likes the way the software can delete files and close down the computer even if it never gets online again.