First, most of them are designed for individuals, not corporations. is an enterprise version of the company's LoJack for Laptops line, and Inspice's also offers an enterprise version. Both tools offer more advanced features such as asset tracking and remote hard disk destruction, which aren't found in an individual product. zTrace Technologies' . for Windows and products all offer quantity pricing for business customers, but not much else in terms of added features over their individual versions.  

Second, the versions that are offered differ as to features between Mac and Windows, with the Mac usually being a poor cousin. Taking Computrace as an example again, the Macs don't include the special embedded BIOS agent that comes with their Windows product . (Phoenix Technologies offers something similar for its OEM BIOS customers called .) And has software for both Mac and Windows, but prices them differently.

If the software isn't part of the BIOS but just lives on your hard disk and if you haven't enabled a firmware or disk password, any intelligent thief can just reformat your hard drive and remove this protection. So it makes sense to take a look at putting these passwords on all of your machines as an added form of protection.

That leads me to my final point: Do you really need a vendor-operated central monitoring station, or can you set up your own central place where alerts can be sent? Gadgettrak, for Macs, PC/Mac PhoneHome and (a free, open source tool for both Mac and Windows) tools don't make use of any central monitoring station, instead, the software sends info to your e-mail (and for Gagettrack, Flickr) accounts directly. Of course, then you have to sort through all these messages when a laptop is reported stolen.

In my next post, we'll talk about using whole disk encryption products for additional protection.