While innovations such as hard disk encryption, strong password mechanisms and biometric technology have done a great deal to guarantee that, if a notebook is stolen, the data on it will be useless, vendors such as Acer say that they have built functionality into their mobile platforms to keep the notebooks safe from theft.

"Under the banner of anti-theft technology, Acer has utilised the functionality available in its GraviSense technology (which detects a bump to the hard disk and automatically parks the hard drive head, thus keeping the drive safe from harm) to detect any kind of motion denoting notebook theft, reacting with a loud, ear-piercing sonic alarm.

"This alarm is so loud, in fact, that most thieves will automatically drop the notebook and cover their ears," says Traci Maynard, business unit manager at Tarsus Technologies.
 
Although this anti-theft feature is extremely effective against theft, Maynard says it does, however, require some form of user intervention. "Through the interface utilised by all of Acer's empowering technologies, users have the ability to enable and disable the protection feature. Once set up, it can be easily activated, with a keystroke or mouse click, when the user walks away from their notebook or set to be automatically triggered after a certain length of inactivity. This feature can be disabled by merely entering a user-defined password," she adds.

What sets this solution apart from the numerous other third party options available on the market, she claims, is the fact that it relies on hardware already built into the Acer mobile platforms and works together with the operating system to deny access to notebook data when the alarm is sounding.

"While the protection feature is active, users are prevented from accessing the 'alt-tab' keystroke or using similar commands, such as 'ctrl-shift-esc', 'ctrl-alt-del' or any of the windows keys or the system task bar. It is a fully-locked down solution," she adds.