The laptop theft recovery software Prey tries to increase the chances by collecting and sending a bunch of information over the Internet. It obviously does not help if the thief is clever enough to format the laptop before using it. If the thief boots the operating system and connects the laptop to the Internet then Prey will be able to submit the data.

Prey works by checking an url regularly for existence. If the url exists it will send out the collected data to a specified email account. The date includes:

This includes the general status of the computer, a list of running programs and active connections, fully-detailed network and wifi information, a screenshot of the running desktop and — in case your laptop has an integrated webcam — a picture of the thief

About the url that has to be created. The laptop theft recovery program has been designed that way to avoid data being send out continuously by the software. Users can for example sign up at a free web hosting service such as Blogger to create the url that the software program checks (for Ghacks it could for example be http://www.ghacks.net/stolen/).

The user needs to specify login data to a s SMTP server so that the data can be transferred. The laptop theft recovery software Prey is available for the Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating system. The Linux and Mac version are currently more advanced and come with a bi-lingual interface, automatic connection to the first open Wi-Fi network.