Installation is easy enough and when you are going through the process using your customer ID, which is unique to you, a handshake takes place between the zServer and your laptop. Now, each and every time you connect to the Internet this stealth handshake takes place and without any song or dance the location of your laptop can be calculated. Should you then ever be in the unfortunate position of having to report your laptop as stolen, you will have two sets of people looking for it, the police and the zTrace team. Together they should be able to pinpoint its exact location and reinstate it to its rightful owner - you.

FOR Very user friendly, simple to install and works in stealth mode to ensure monitoring your laptops location will be accomplished without any whistles and bells. AGAINST Documentation a little thin. VERDICT A very useful way of locating a stolen laptop without the thief being aware of it. It even foils attempts to disable any stealth program by reformatting, surviving to make that crucial handshake in order to provide an exact location. Scoring & Testing?

zTrace Gold is especially designed for the enterprise. It can be managed by your own internal security team if you don’t want to outsource any of your security, but for those that want to take the hassle out of their security management the option is there to let the zTrace recovery team manage it all for you.

Because zTrace Gold operates in stealth mode there are no files, icons, directories, or anything else to see - anything that would alert a thief to its whereabouts; in fact they won’t know it’s there until hopefully they are caught. Suitable for Internet connection, whether dial-up, cable modem, DSL, T1 or wireless, you can benefit from its location-finding techniques, should you need them. It will even find a computer that has dialed in on a blocked or unlisted caller ID. So even if the thief thinks he or she is being clever, has reformatted the disk and then used an unlisted number to dial out from, zTrace Gold will still initiate that handshake and provide a location for the authorities to investigate thoroughly.

Although it all seems very simple, and it is for the user, and although the trace cannot be made without the laptop being connected, you can be pretty sure in this day and age that at some point, somewhere, it will be. So even if your computer is whisked across the oceans it can still be located, as once connected to the Internet, zTrace Gold will locate it.