IOWA TRACKING STOLEN COMPUTERSTracking Your LaptopFor Mary Roemer, her laptop is her lifeline. "My calender, all of my clients' information, all of my friends' and family phone numbers and addresses."

But one day, Mary's laptop was stolen from the backseat of her car. "The first thing is, 'my husband's going to kill me.' The second thing was, 'oh, my God--my computer!"

Brian Cooley with CNET says it's an all too common story, more than six hundred thousand laptops are robbed in this country every year. "Getting a laptop back when it's stolen is a slim to none proposition."

But Mary decided to increase her odds thanks to software hidden on her hard drive that can pinpoint exact location. "The computer was probably found within a month. I was amazed."

You can do it too! Tom Tobul with IBM, says a growing number of leading laptop makers now offer tracking technology with selected notebooks. "We can make sure that it ships with that solution from the factory. So, your system would be protected from the first day."

Bradley Lide with CyberAngel says people can also get trackers are also available directly from some software companies. Mary protects her laptop with CyberAngel. "We have an 85 to 89 percent recovery ratio."

Regardless of where you get the trackers, they cost between 40 and 50 dollars a year. Here's how they work: you report your lost laptop to the software company. Once a thief logs online, the software sends a signal to a monitoring center.

Bradley Lide with CyberAngel says they can identify that phone number or IP Address that it calls from. "We can pinpoint the location down to a street address, registered name for that address even provide a map to that location to a local law enforcement."

Police then recover the laptop for you. But, Computer Expert Brian Cooley admits there are some vulnerabilities. "It doesn't do any good unless the person with the stolen computer eventually puts it on the Internet."

The thief must also bypass the tracking agent by erasing and reformatting the hard drive. But software maker Bradley Lide says that's not likely. "By the virtue of our product being very stealthy, they don't know that there's something on there, so it doesn't give them a cause or reason to violate to format the hard drive."

Luckily for Mary, her laptop was located and now she's back on track thanks to her tracking software. "I was relieved. I would suggest that anybody should take advantage of it."

In Cedar Rapids, one laptop gets stolen every week. According to the Cedar Rapids Police Department most laptops are stolen from a car.

Lieutenant Kenneth Washburn with the Cedar Rapids Police Department says the best way to keep your laptop safe, is to keep it out of sight. "If they are going to leave them in a car overnight or something, put them in a trunk or hide them somewhere, so someone coming by just doesn't look in the car and see them."

In addition to keeping your laptop out of sight, experts say there are other ways you can prevent your laptop from being stolen. You can use a cable lock that will secure your computer to a desk. There are also motion detectors that will sound an alarm if the laptop is moved out of a specified area.