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Go without my laptop for 24 hours, psshh, that’s easy…or so I thought!
That was the challenge presented to me by the good folks over at Absolute Software to partake in the Absolute LoJack Challenge to simulate having my device stolen. So there I sat, in the Denver airport, getting ready to travel for work. Sure I had my work laptop and could just whip that out, but that would be ‘cheating’ in my eyes. When I travel for work, I typically have my work computer and then either my own laptop or iPad with me as my work computer is restricted for certain use only. So, now I had nothing…but my phone, and I was instantly reminded of the commercial playing recently where everyone is trying to find an outlet to plug their phone into at the airport.
For the past 6 months I have been using my Sony Vaio for almost everything until I recently replaced my desktop computer a couple weeks ago. Therefore it has just about everything on it that could be important or that I needed: financial documents for my online businesses, my calendar, my photos, music, banking information, files for my web design clients, and so much more. Sure all of that can be replaced by continually backing up the data and just restoring it to a new computer if stolen, but then it wouldn’t be my computer. A little bit of nervous energy starts to flow through your body when thinking about what you would loose if your device is stolen.
Then I had that “Ah-Ha” moment…luckily I had installed Absolute LoJack on my computer; I received a copy for review and this challenge. If my computer were truly stolen, Absolute Lojack (AJ) employees a team of hard working investigators that could track, lock, and delete any files I needed to be cleared off. The software installs to the lowest level possible and can not be deleted by any random thug or removed with a hard reset of mobile devices. Then once locked, the AJ crew could go as far as RECOVER(!!!!) my laptop. Now that would deserve a big sigh of relief and it did knowing that in a real situation I would be covered.
Wouldn’t you want that piece of mind for your device? Your life line? Think about how much you use your computer, smartphone, or tablet and what information it has on it that could be bad if in the wrong hands. Absolute Lojack is going to do more for you than Find My iPhone can and keep you safe while recovering your device.
So back to not having a computer to use for 24 hours. Have you tried to exclusively use your phone to do all your web browsing, emailing, Facebooking, and tweeting? My eyes were ready to pop out of my head at the end of the day from looking at a small screen. Sure there are apps for Facebook and Twitter, but that doesn’t work so well when you’re reading news sites or watching the 22 best fail videos of the #icebucketchallenge. When my work day finished and I got back to my hotel, all I wanted to do was pull out my laptop, surf the web mindlessly some, interact with some twitter followers, and just unwind. But that now was not an option.
Luckily most of my time going #digitallydark was spent working because if it had not been, I can only imagine what I would have done with myself. The pacing around, reorganizing, pushing papers around, and thinking would have been too much to handle. Oh and the worrying about what was happening to my computer. It’s funny how connected we all are now and how hard it is to disconnect, even temporarily.
Sure, my experience going digitally dark was simulated, but there are so many stories of laptops stolen from college campuses, dorm rooms, and vehicles, it is overwhelming. Here’s one quote from a student about how Absolute recovered her laptop.
My Macbook Pro was stolen from my house just before Christmas. It is my school computer, and I was devastated to have lost it. Thankfully I had LoJack installed on the Mac, and it took less than sixty days for them to track down my computer even after the thieves had wiped the hard drive and sold it to someone else. The detective working on the case said that they never would have recovered my computer without LoJack. It is definitely worth the price, completely and totally worth the price. Take it from a police officer, he said that having LoJack was the best investment I could have made!
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Absolute LoJack provided a copy of their software to me for review and use during this challenge, however, all opinions expressed are my own.
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