**** WARNING computrace lojack for laptops and DELL STUDIO XPS 1340 ***

if you own a dell studio xps 1340 and either subscribe to computrace lojack for laptops, or it came bundled with your computer , you might want to know that either the bios agent in this computer is either missing or actually broken. when activating computrace in the bios, it is actually doing nothing.



some time ago i upgraded to wirdows vista utiltmate from home premium . this is when my laptop stopped contacting the monitoring center for 30 days.

i reinstalled computrace and started contacting the center.

when i called absolute.com for support. they informed me that although the m1330 has the bios agent, they say that the xps 1340 is not on thier list of supported machines.

i opened up my dell xps 1340 and put in a spare sata drive and wiped it, and used the windows vista cd that came with the computer and installed vista

after creating a user name. and rebooting a couple times. i see no evidence that the bios agent actually reinstalled it. when computrace is working

you should see their process running in task manager. after wiping the hard drive, the computrace installation did not automatically recover.

if you got computrace either bundled or purchased seperately, you should be aware of this, in case your xps 1340 gets stolen. it may never come back.

i tried calling the xps support team today, but after discussing it. they have no idea what im talking about or how to contact the bios team



the bios version used for the test was A07



another problem with enabling the bios agent is that it disables you from updating your bios.

this can be fixed by using the /forcetype command line parameter in your dell bios update utilty.

 

computrace lojack for laptop says:

There is nothing wrong with the Lojack for Laptops license on your machine. It is successfully installed and it is communicating with our monitoring center. The Computrace agent which is embedded on the BIOS of specific makes and models of machines is not included on your machine so the fact that the Computrace agent is not reinstalling LoJack after a hard drive format is normal for your machine. The only problem with your machine is simply the Computrace appears on the BIOS which has lead you to believe that your machine is equipped with Computrace. If you are looking for a machine that is equipped with a Computrace agent, I would recommend getting this machine replaced with a machine that is equipped with one. Pretty much any of the Dell machines that are listed on the absolute website will be equipped with a Computrace agent.

 

What a bummer. My 1530 was stolen and recovered in 9 days. The thief did a fresh install of vista on the machine and it still contacted computrace. I alternate hard drives with vista ultimate x64, oem vista ultimate x86, and windows 7 x64. my computer contacts computrace everyday i am on it. I was told by some members, that i would have to install lojack on any hard drive change and it is not true.

 

Will it work with the 1640 XPS ?

 

http://www.absolute.com/products/bios-compatibility

is the list that you should consult to determine if your dell computers have the bios agent. you should test lojack by switching out a hard disk! from time to time!

i sent an overnight fedex letter to dell hq and asked them to reimburse me $109.99 for being misled, heh i doubt ill hear from them, heh

 

I contacted Dell and Computrace and they told me that lojack will work just fine with the 1340 and 1640 . So who is telling the truth ?

 

Since the 1340 and 1640 do not show up on the Computrace list, this suggests that Dell does not embed the Computrace Agent Persistence Module into the bios of the 1340 and 1640.

If this is true, the program will "work just fine" but provide a greatly weakened state of security with the 1340 and 1640. It can be defeated by thieves much easier by simply reformatting or replacing the hard drive.

This is unlike computers with the bios based Computrace Agent Persistence Module which will still function and protect after a hard drive reformat or replacement since it is built into the bios of the computer.

Only Dell can add the persistence module to the computer bios. The user can not add it by loading the computrace program.