On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 23:53 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
Yup, applies to both the Thinkpad and the Dell, of course the Thinkpad is a bit more convoluted than the Dell but both are an excellent first step toward discouraging people from nicking laptops.
Except of course a lot of thieves are stupid. They won't realise that you've locked it down until they have nicked it, at which point they will just dump it or sell it to someone who has the facilities to get rid of the password.
I get your point though, if every laptop manufacturer did this as well as IBM and pretty much enforced the security out of the box then we would see less laptop theft. Trouble is given peoples tendency to forget login credentials I am guessing this would cause a lot of support headaches.
Actually I think Thinkpad's have the best anti theft defence, they often look (to the untrained eye) a lot older than they are (because the design hasn't really changed much from about 1995). Put a nice IBM T series next to a shiny silver Packard Hell and I'll bet the Packard gets nicked first (good riddance too, but that's a personal opinion)