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It's the nightmare nobody wants to think about: somebody's taken your laptop. Sure, maybe it was just an accident, since many of them look the same. but nevertheless, whether through careless mistake or by deliberate theft by some low-life, you are here and your computer is somewhere else. With the cost of your system—to say nothing of all the important data that lives on it—on the line, you'd sure like to get it back, pronto.

Prey is a tool that just might give you a hand with that. Obviously you have to install it before your laptop goes missing—something about closing the barn door after the horse has already escaped—but it can then assist you in the recovery effort. The way it works is this: at a pre-determined interval, Prey checks for the existence of a specific URL. If it finds it, everything is just hunky-dory. But if the machine has gone missing, all you have to do is to get rid of the page at that address, and Prey will know that something's up. At that point, it will do things like report on where it is and what it's doing—and if you've got a webcam, you may even get a picture of the thief. It can use a wired connection, or search for a viable Wi-Fi signal, and for Mac and Linux systems, you can install the app as Root, so your thief doesn't even have to be logged in to let you know what's up.

Prey is available for Windows, Mac, and various Linux distros, or if you're really feeling adventurous, you can grab the source code and roll it yourself.

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Everybody agrees that when it comes to passwords, bigger is better. After all, one of the best ways to frustrate a brute-force attack is to increase geometrically the number of combinations of characters that are necessary. Add to this all the other safeguards that are included in any robust password protection scheme—upper- and lower case alphabetic characters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks, no dictionary words, etc.—and you've gone a long way toward keeping your accounts secure. The flip side of that, of course, is the impossibility of remembering dozens of unique 40-character passwords for all of your financial- and other accounts.

LastPass is an online password manager. All you need to remember is your password to get into LastPass, and everything else can be as complicated—and safe—as you want. Along with passwords, it also remembers all that other fill-in-the-blank stuff you need to speed-up the process of entering your information into web forms: name, address, credit card numbers, the whole thing.

It's available as a desktop app for Windows, or as a plugin for your Windows, Mac, or Linux web browser.

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No matter how much the purveyors of shrink-wrapped software would have you believe it, there really is no reason to have to spend a small—or not so small—fortune on applications to run on your computer. That's not to say that the fine folks at Microsoft and all the other big name development shops don't put out some pretty cool tools, but an awful lot of what you want to do can be done with apps that don't cost you a dime.

Not so much an application, MacLibre is sort of a "greatest hits" collection of free software for your Macintosh. Now instead of running all over the place grabbing individual apps, you can download the whole pile all at once.

MacLibre includes productivity tools like NeoOffice (a Mac-ized version of OpenOffice), Internet tools and browsers, sound and graphics editors (Audacity and GIMP), and a bunch of utility apps as well. You could find yourself with a pretty well equipped system for the cost of only a few minutes worth of downloading.

MacLibre is distributed as a Universal Binary. That means that it'll run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs; you should be able to use it on systems that are running Panther (OS X 10.3) or later.

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One of the more helpful things about living in the world of the Mac is the ease and convenience of creating disk images on the fly for archiving applications and documents. A couple of clicks of the mouse, and you've got a nice, neat little bundle of data—a DMG file—that you can store away, or even easily transport without whacking any file's Mac-ness—resource fork, Finder metadata, icons, and all that good stuff. Here's a tool that takes that ability and goes one better.

SecureFiles lets you create images, but it adds the ability to encrypt those images as well. Just tell it how big your image needs to be, give it a password, and start dragging files into it. It uses 128-bit AES encryption, so it's not likely that your data's going to be easily compromised. As a nice added bonus, if you guessed wrong when you originally established your image's size, you can compact it without breaking it.

SecureFiles is a Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4 or later.

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Microsoft Windows is a handy place to live. It's widely available, everybody writes apps for it, and there is a lot of support available out there. That's all good. But there is a darker side to the O/S from Redmond as well.

Your system likes to keep track of where you've been, and what you've produced. Your Word and Excel documents can be traced back to you. Your web browsing history is no secret. Indeed, there are a whole host of possible security issues that come along with Windows. Maybe it's time to see what you can do to tighten up your security.

How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy is a free downloadable e-book. In simple and straightforward terms, the author explains what kinds of security threats you should guard against on your computer and small office/home office network. There are recommendations for no-cost online tools you can use, and free software you can install on your system that can help to tighten up the security of your system and make your computing safer.

How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy is a free download. You'll need to have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 5 or later) to read the e-book.

Download How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy E-book

Everything's got a password. Online bank accounts. Online mail accounts. Editing your blog. Logging in to your network at work. That's a lot of accounts, and that means a lot of passwords.

Now you can avoid having to remember a bunch of login information if you always use the same short passwords that are based on dictionary words or easily knowable personal facts about yourself, or if you always write them down on sticky notes and hang them on your monitor. Of course, with that approach, you can also forget about keeping your money, identity, work product, and everything else that those passwords are supposed to protect. If you really want to keep things safe, you should use long, complicated, impossible-to-remember passwords, and change them regularly. Good luck keeping track of all that.

Password Gorilla may be the tool you've been looking for. A cross platform app for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and more, it helps you to use passwords the way they were intended. Now instead of having to remember a whole brain-full of passwords, you can store account names, passwords, URLs, notes, and more in Password Gorilla's encrypted database. Now you only have to remember one password, and everything else is safe and sound behind it. If you're feeling particularly uninspired, it will help you generate serious passwords that nobody is likely to crack in this (or several more) lifetimes.

Password Gorilla is a free download.

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Where's that memo? I'm sure I had it here just a minute ago. It must have gotten up and walked away on its own.

I'm sure I'll find the memo, since we know it didn't really sprout legs and walk away. But what about other things on your desktop? Like your computer?

No, your trusty Mac isn't likely to walk away on its own either, but if it had some help—the dreaded "five-finger discount," for example—it might well part ways with you. And that's bad, right?

This may be a job for Lockdown. An anti-theft application that runs on your system, once it's up and running, anything from the slightest tap on your computer will set off audible alarms, which can't be shut off or muted. It'll even snap a picture of the perpetrator with your built-in iSight camera. It can even email a copy of that photo to you. Once it's back in your hands, it's easy to turn off the racket, using your Apple Remote or by typing your password back into your computer.

Lockdown is an OS X application. It requires Leopard (10.5) or later.

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How much stuff do you have? Sure, you have a lot of things, but what exactly do you have? Nobody likes to think about it, but there are times when that precise list may become vital.

If your home were to be burglarized, or if a fire or some natural disaster should befall you, your insurance company is going to want a complete list of what was lost, including names, numbers, purchase dates, values, and more. That's a lot more than "some computers and other stuff."

Of course, the time to take a detailed inventory is before you need to use it. A software tool like KnowYourStuff may be a good way to make sure you're prepared for this unfortunate eventuality. This easy-to-use tool makes taking and recording inventory information much less onerous. The setup wizard makes it easy to start, prompting your for the names of the rooms in your house. Working room-by-room, you can go through the process of adding to your list. Once your inventory is complete, it's easy to add additional items over time when they acquired.

Once you're done, you can store your inventory electronically (hard drive, CD-ROM, remote location) or print it out and stick it in your safe deposit box. They also have an optional paid service where you can upload your list.

KnowYourStuff is a free download. It's available for both Windows (Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 120.3 or later).

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There aren't tons of Cupertino-hating viruses out there, but it's still prudent to keep your system as buttoned-up as possible. There are several free options for anti-virus tools out there for Windows machines, but not so many for Macs. iAntiVirus is one of the latter.

Created by the folks at PC Tools, iAntiVirus will help protect your Mac against infection by viruses, worms, and many of the other "nasties" that can at best slow your system down, and at worst wipe out your personal data and more.

While you can use it to scan your system on a regular basis to look for problems, it also helps you to stay secure in real time, running silently in the background keeping an eye on things. It includes automatic "smart update" functionality, making sure that your protection is always up to date.

iAntiVirus is a Mac application. It only runs on Intel-based Macs, and requires OS X 10.5 or later.

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Could there be anything more horrible than the loss of your laptop computer? Well, yes, I suppose so, but it's certainly pretty high up on the list. Whether you misplaced your machine, or somebody decided to acquire it via "five finger discount", now you're here and your baby's somewhere else. If you'd like to be reunited, it would be a good idea to have installed Adeona on your machine before it goes missing.

Adeona, named after the Roman goddess of "safe returns", is a free, open source tool that lets you track your laptop or any other computer. Unlike proprietary solutions, you don't have to rely on a server somewhere keeping track of the whereabouts of your machine—meaning they could keep track of where you go, as well as where any potential thief may go with your system. Adeona "phones home" about every half hour, but not on an exact schedule, making it a little tricker to detect its use. It reports back a wealth of information about your missing computer: IP address, nearby routers, wireless hotspots currently in use. The Mac version can even use your built-in camera to snap a photo of the thief.

It's important to remember that while Adeona can help you locate your missing computer, and perhaps even implicate the thief, that you should then report this information to law enforcement or other appropriate authorities and not try to effect a recovery yourself.

A free download, Adeona is available for Linux, OS X (10.4+), and Windows (XP+) users.

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