The idea conjured up all sorts of wonderful fantasies. My laptop is stolen. I call a number and before the setting of the next sun, a swat team of heavily armed and armored paramilitary police are breaking down the door of a bandit's den to reclaim my purloined computer.

At least that's my fantasy. In fact, the reality may not be that far off. Well, maybe not a swat team and maybe there wouldn't be a whole nest of bandits involved, but there is a recently renamed software product that promises pretty much that.

Absolute Software's LoJack for Laptops used to be called CompuTrace, and now it's back with a new name and a new identity. It's also in some respects a little scary. More on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, I did spend some time playing with LoJack for Laptops. The folks at Absolute Software delivered a disk to my office and, after a few glitches having to do with my outdated laptop software, I successfully installed it, made the appropriate calls to an 800-number in Vancouver, British Columbia. And lo and behold, they told me just where my laptop was located.

It worked perfectly. Inevitably, there's more to the story than that, of course. Basically, the idea is that you walk into CompUSA, where it went on sale Monday, plunk down $49.95 (or $99 for three years of protection), and you go home with the program on a compact disc. (There are absolute hopes to add more retailers later this year.)

Load it onto your laptop, and it dials into a computer in Vancouver, it logs you on, registers your computer's serial number and who you are along with a password. Then, you sit back and wait for it to be stolen.

If that happens, that's when the "recovery team" kicks into action. Those are the go-to people. If your computer does walk out of your office, hotel room or the trunk of your car, you simply call the 800-number, or go to another computer, and report it stolen. Within seconds, your computer goes on Absolute Software's "most wanted" list.

It works like a charm, as soon as the bandits use your stolen laptop to go online. By the way, all the time your computer's been sitting in your office or den, it has been regularly checking in with its master in Vancouver. If the computer gets into the wrong hands and is reported stolen, Absolute's recovery team will see that status pop up on their screen.

Within seconds, Absolute can use one of three ways to determine where the wayward computer has gone. If it's a dial-up modem, it can tell what phone number the computer is using to get online, and trace the address. If it's broadband, it can track the IP address and then, with cooperation from the Internet Service Provider, locate the street address where the IP is installed. And then there's a third way that even John Livingston, Absolute's chairman and CEO won't tell us about.

Once the computer's been located, the recovery team--all ex-cops, by the way, most of them from the Vancouver police--call local law enforcement and tell them where they can find the purloined device.

"At the beginning, we wondered whether law enforcement would really care about laptops," Livingston confessed. "But they were very supportive. Property theft is a situation where they don't get a lot of success. But this is stolen property with a built-in electronic tip where it's located. They also realized that, in 5 per cent of the cases, the location they go to other criminal activity is taking place."

Last month, for instance, a distress call came from a laptop in McKinney, Texas. The local police stumbled onto a big chop-shop location with drugs and weapons. They also got the stolen computer back.

This is also one tough little piece of software. LoJack for Laptops-Absolute licensed the Lojack name from the car theft recovery company-can survive the entire stripping and reformatting of the hard disk. And, to make it even more invulnerable, most of the big laptop makers-IBM/Lenovo, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Gateway-have just begun embedding a recovery chip on their system boards, so that even if the thief replaces the hard drive, the computer will still be able to make that SOS call.

Sounds a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. You can almost hear the computer growling, "I'll be baaaack."

Which is where a few little concerns come in.

First, the software does live on your computer pretty much forever. You can "uninstall" the software, but I had to wonder whether it really goes away. Second, it turns out that the folks in Vancouver can, only on your instructions of course, wipe the hard disk or any of the data or software on it when you report the computer stolen.

Now that's great, if you don't want your last five years' tax returns falling into the hands of a greedy whistle-blower. But, despite Livingstone's assurances, I was a little worried about just how much Tania in Absolute's recovery department was able to see on my hard drive back there in Vancouver.

Finally, there still isn't a version for Apple Macintosh computers, at least not a consumer version, though there is a corporate product. Absolute says one will be forthcoming by year's end.

And, when we tried to install the software on my wife's ancient Dell laptop, it didn't take to Windows98 operating system. There is a version that works on Windows98, but you have to get it straight from the Web site. Type www.lojackforlaptops.com. There'll be someone out there listening!