LockItTight

So you're in a swanky coffeeshop in a trendy neighborhood with a friendly vibe. You only got up to refill your water glass... and your laptop is gone. Vanished. No one looked up from their own laptop or phone to see who walked off with it. It gets farther away by the second: It could be on the other side of the planet in hours. If you were signed up with LockItTight's free online service, you'd be able to log on to LockItTight's site, access your account, and see where your PC is now. Not only that, but you might have caught the thief in the act! LockItTight also records screenshots, Webcam images, keystrokes, and clipboard data. If anyone monkeys with your PC while you're away from it, it can show you when they used your computer, what they did, their keystrokes, and, if your Webcam is active, their identity.

You'll need to visit LockItTight's Web site and sign up for a free account to install the client software on your PC. It's easy to do, but you'll have to provide personal information like name and time zone. Once you've logged in, LockItTight finishes the installation process and opens a Web-based console. We logged in to our online account and opened our Devices page. This is an ad-supported Web page that listed our PC as our first device. Clicking Show on Map opened a Google Maps page showing the location of our PC. It must have been our ISP's server because it was our town but not in the hood, so to speak. But that was with a cable modem hookup, not WiFi; mobile users should get better results. You can add a variety of mobile devices for LockItTight to track, too.

Clicking our device's name in LockItTight's console opened a new page with a series of buttons accessing LockItTight's security logs: Location(s), Screens, Camera, Files, Keys, Clipboard, and Browser History. One thing: Neither the Web page nor the data LockItTight's freeware version captures are encrypted. To encrypt captures, you must upgrade to the paid version, which also removes the ads.