Following Alexandra’s earlier post about the importance of backing up your work and protecting your dissertation, this might be informative as well in case your laptop gets lost or stolen.
I’m not sure if it helps with computers as a halfway competent thief will probably wipe the harddisk before it can connect to the web. But it's free and probably can't hurt having it - just in case you're lucky enough to have a stupid thief.
So, after you have backed up your work (because we can’t stress enough how important that is), consider the below as a second form of insurance to help recover the hardware.
There are some excellent free software solutions available to protect laptops and track them if stolen/missing, such as: http://preyproject.com/ (works on mac, windows and linux)
Once installed and the portable reported missing, it can send reports to the owner's email with photographs of the "thieve" that is using the laptop, screen shots, the ip address of the network were it is being used and, more important, an estimated geographical location, based on the network that it is connected to. With the ip address, the internet service provider can localize the exact house number and address (provided they want to do it). These should be all very useful for the police.
Of course this needs to be installed before the laptop is missing. This is by no means a replacement for a regular backup habit!
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