How to prepare your PC or laptop for theft

One thing you can do that will make theft less lightly is to uglify your laptop.

• Put some duck tape around the hinges and/or battery hatch.
• Put on a godawful sticker on the back.
• Remove an unused key or two from the keyboard if you can, they are easy to snap back into place.

All these are reversible, if you don't care about resell value give the cover a good scratch with a key.

Here are a few detailed tips & tricks (mostly from Lifehacker)

10 Tips to Keep Your Notebook Safe when Traveling

How to Set Up a Laptop Security System

You could 1 put some baby photos as wallpaper or in the laptop bag
2 Never use a Laptop bag (thats a neon sign)
3 Uglify your laptop if you are visiting a crime prone area

Use Software

Top 10 Ways to Lock Down Your Data

Prey Phones Home to Help You Recover Your Stolen Laptop

Goto: Lifehacker for many other articles on theft.

I purchased 4 year protection from Lojack for Laptops. They have you install something that gets embedded in the BIOS. It allows tracking of the laptop to still be possible, even after a reformat. They also maintain a relationship with law enforcement to quickly determine the location of any activations after theft.

I can't testify to their recovery efficiency, b/c the laptop was never stolen. But at least one time, I got a email warning "LoJack for Laptops has not received contact from your computer - Action Required". I had to call the owner and they confirmed, "Yeah, I haven't turned on my computer in over a month, how'd you know?"

They have other testimonials here: http://www.absolute.com/resource_center/search?market=home. I was satisfied with the piece of mind it bought.

• Encrypt your drive with an insanely strong password. If it's hard to remember, and you need to keep a copy of it, store it apart from your laptop.
• Turn off your browsing history, saved forms, and make sure to destroy any private data after browsing. Firefox has a number of ways to do this.