How to Find a Lost or Stolen Laptop

Thanks to the Find My Device feature, it’s super easy to find a lost or stolen laptop, here’s how to activate it on computers running Windows 10

Losing a laptop or finding out it’s been stolen from us is a real nightmare. Luckily recently, thanks to some special features, it is quite easy to track down a lost notebook. Even on Windows 10 there are these security options.

To activate the feature to track the lost or stolen laptop we have to go to Settings and then to Update and Security. Clicking in this section will open a page with different functions, from Restore to Windows Update. We are interested in the Find My Device item, so we scroll down the list on the left until we find this section and click on it. If we don’t have the location services active, it is possible not to see this function. Instead, we will see this wording: “enable location settings to use this feature”. Let’s click on this item and follow the wizard to activate the Find My Device service.

How Find My Device Works

Once we get access to the Find My Device feature we will see a statement indicating that the mode is disabled. Let’s click on the “Edit” button to set the feature. A pop-up menu will then open where we need to move the checkmark from Disabled to Enabled. And that’s it. At this point every now and then the location of our notebook will be saved and sent to Microsoft. If we lose our PC or it gets stolen, just log on to account.microsoft.com/devices. On the site just click on Find My Device to see the last recorded location of the laptop. It should be noted, however, that in order to save a location the PC must be connected to the Internet.