Guide to Remotely Track Lost Smartphone,Laptop or Tablet

If you loose your Smartphone or laptop or tablet, then you can remotely track it. Not only you can track it, you can even remotely Lock or Wipe it. Tracking Process is easy for smartphones that are connected with a data connection. but its hard to track a laptop because once you loose it, it may be powered off.

So Do not wait until you have lost your device, there are some features that need to be enables so that tracking process becomes Smooth. So Let us peep in to see how to Track your lost device and what precautions you need to take.

Tracking Smartphones, laptops or Tablets Remotely :

Tracking MAC, iPhone and iPad:

Tracking MAC, iPhone and iPad:

The Find My Feature in your Apple Device helps you to track your Stolen or lost Apple Device. You need to Enable this Feature.The “Find My” features are part of Apple’s iCloud service. 

To enable this feature, open the Settings app, tap iCloud, and set the Find My iPhone or Find My iPad slider to On. You’ll need to enable this setting on each device you want to track. If you haven’t set up iCloud on your device, you’ll be prompted to set up an iCloud account here.

For a Mac, open the System Preferences window (Apple menu > System Preferences), click the iCloud icon, and ensure the Find My Mac box is checked. You’ll be prompted to set up iCloud here if you haven’t already. Choose a Strong Password.

It is an amazing Feature by Apple, Whenever you put your iPhone or iPad in Lost Mode, iCloud will do its work and will track the movements so that you can see the History.

You can Remotely Lock a MAC, it will suddenly shut down it when the person tries to use it, he/she will have to enter the firmware password to boot it. They will be restricted to boot any operating system without the password. You can even Wipe all the data in your IOS device or MAC if you want.

Tracking Android Smartphone & Tablet:

To track Android Smartphone or Tablet we will use Android Device manager, which is an amazing feature to find your stolen smartphones. You need to activate andriod device manager no your device. Here is how to do it...

Go to Settings > Then move to Security > Then move to Device Administrators > Android Device Manager > Activate it

After it’s enabled, you can visit the Google Play website, click the gear icon, and select Android Device Manager. You’ll see the location of the device on a map. Unlike Apple’s solution, Android Device Manager will be wiped after a factory reset. You can Ring the Device, Lock it or Erase all the data.

Thief can reset your device and you won’t be able to track it down. Android Device Manager also won’t monitor a complete history of a lost device’s movements. it only fetches the location of the device when you sign in. It discards any location data when you sign out.

App to Track Android Smartphones:

Android Lost allows you to start tracking a device remotely, even if you never set up tracking software ahead of time. I would recommend you to download this app in your android device. Other tracking solutions offer more powerful features like the ability to take photos with the phone’s camera or listen in on the phone’s surroundings with its microphone.

Tracking Windows Phone:

Microsoft's Windows Phones comes with a feature called Find My Phone. You can Configure it by navigating to Settings > Find my phone.

Now you can visit Windows phone Website and click Find my Phone which will be at the top right Corner. If someone Factory resets your phone then this feature will be disabled.

Tracking Windows Laptops:

To Track your Stolen Laptops. We will be using Softwares that you need to install in your laptops. So that if in case you lose your laptop then you can track it later.

I will share two Softwares called Prey and Lockittight.  Both of these and all other similar softwares work in a simlar way. You Install any of these softwares, create account with then, so if your laptop gets stolen you can login to thier website to check the location of your laptop.

Prey offers this service for Windows, Mac and linux too.  It has paid plans but the free one will be good to just track the locations.

So you start with Downloading and Installing Prey Software, once installed it will ask you to create a New Account, So Create it.

Now you are almost safe, if in future you lose your laptop. Just Login to their website and set the slider from “OK” to “Missing” Prey only tracks your device when it’s missing, so it isn’t constantly tracking your laptop’s location. Be sure to also enable the Geo feature, which uses your laptop’s internal GPS hardware or the names of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots to report its location.

Once you’ve set your laptop to missing, its status will become “Tracked, waiting for report.” When the Prey software on your laptop checks in with the Prey server, it will receive a message that it has been marked as lost and generate a report. You’ll only receive an alert if the laptop is powered on, connected to the Internet, and the Prey software is still installed.