How to Recover a Lost Phone or Laptop

Oh, no! You left your cell phone in the cab! Your laptop got snatched while the TSA finished their patdown! Your critical gear is lost, gone, finito -- and you're screwed.

Or maybe not. With a little proactive planning and preparation, you may be able to recover your missing hardware.

Over at PC World, Robert Strohmeyer explains what to do when you lose your tech gear. (Nepotism alert: I'm a PC World contributor myself.) Following a near-disastrous (but thankfully short-lived) loss of his Android phone, Strohmeyer compiled this comprehensive guide to apps, services, and options for recovering and protecting lost gear. Here's an excerpt from the section on locking down your phone:

Before we consider various fancy-pants tricks for securing and finding a lost phone, let's focus on the most basic task: setting a password.

Nearly every cell phone on earth--smart or otherwise--has some kind of passcode protection built in, yet almost nobody uses the feature because it adds an annoying 3-second delay to the process of making a call. Well, get over it. Set a password--or an "unlock pattern," if you're an Android user. Do it now, and you'll avoid worrying later on whether someone out there is reading through your e-mail or accessing your Facebook account on your lost phone.

Strohmeyer neglected to mention that important item, but he does cover crucial areas like smartphone backups (a topic we've covered in the past), recovery services (ditto), and habits to adopt that can help you avoid losing stuff in the first place.

You know what they say about an ounce of prevention, right? Don't learn your lesson the hard way.