Stolen laptops are a real problem. Whichever statistics you choose to believe, the numbers are staggering and growing every year. Granted, this is no great surprise since laptop use is growing every year (side note: I haven’t seen anything but it would be interesting to compare the growth of laptop use with the growth of laptop theft).

With today’s solutions, a stolen laptop causes many problems and headaches:

• Confidential data may be lost
• User isn’t able to work until new hardware can be provisioned
• In a best case scenario, there is a recent backup of user data that can be restored to a new machine
• Employee wastes time re-customizing machine to their liking
• IT needs to build the laptop…best case, this involves an updated image
• Employee hunts down license keys for user-specific programs, wasting more time
• Depending on data on laptop, may need to communicate loss to customers which can be costly and embarrassing

What if there were a better way? What if you could simply “turn off” the laptop remotely?

This isn’t a problem with NxTop.

NxTop’s architecture separates the four main components that make up a PC: the hardware, operating systems, data and applications. This presents a very unique way of dealing with laptop theft: since all four components are separate, you can simply stop a piece of hardware (a stolen laptop) from accessing the other four components. Without that access, the stolen laptop is no longer a real problem.

As for the user, simply get them a new piece of hardware and provision a new NxTop to them. A few mouse clicks is all it takes to get them up and running on a new laptop, complete with their previous configuration (including any customization they’ve made), all of their user data and applications, and virtually no loss of productivity – and less of a headache for the IT administrator.

Sure, you still lose the hardware (assuming it isn’t recovered or found) but that’s much less of a loss than it could be otherwise.

Want to try NxTop for yourself? We’re still perfecting it but take a moment to register and we’ll let you know as soon as NxTop is available for download.

We’ve been following the trend of laptop and desktop shipments over the past year and knew that it was only a matter of time before laptops overtook desktops in number of units shipped and purchased.

This is, of course, part of the reason we’re focusing NxTop’s capabilities on laptops – when half of your potential customers are using a particular device, you better make sure you work on it.

Well, what we expected has happened: IDC has released a new study showing that laptop shipments overtook desktop shipments for the first time in Q3. From the IDC press release:

The third quarter of 2008 (3Q08) saw notebook shipments into the U.S. market surpass 50% share, topping quarterly desktop PC shipments for the first time in the history of the industry. The share of notebooks shipped in the U.S. in 3Q08 stood at a solid 55.2%, according to preliminary figures from IDC’s U.S. Quarterly PC Tracker.

The 55% ratio was made possible by a record volume of notebooks shipped in 3Q08 – over 9.5 million units – representing more than 18% growth both year over year and on a sequential basis, according to IDC’s preliminary data. These figures were reached amid a relatively active back-to-school season and the burgeoning financial crisis, which captured headlines but did not immediately affect the PC market’s performance.

The full article is available on IDC’s website.

I see that laptop sales helped drive some nice profit numbers for HP.

No surprise, really. Companies are starting to (or are continuing to) buy laptops for employees instead of desktops since laptop costs have gone down and workers are increasingly mobile. Lower costs, higher productivity and happier employees is a great combination.

Are you using a laptop at work? Still using a desktop?

Over this past weekend, I was working remotely. I think it’s great and convenient that I can take my laptop with me on the go and get a bit of work done pretty much anywhere there is an internet connection (home, a coffee shop, some restaurants and a few places around me even have free public access). Unfortunately, I had trouble accessing our VPN, so some files I needed to access that aren’t on my local system were just out of my reach.

You see, I don’t keep everything on my laptop just in case. There are some files with sensitive data that I can’t risk losing or having someone else get their hands on if, say, my laptop was stolen. These files sit on our network. I can usually access everything no problem but that wasn’t the case this weekend.

This is the downside to working remotely — not having 100% of the files and information I need to get work done. There are alternatives but those don’t always work (for example, I couldn’t FTP into our servers to grab what I needed because port 80 wasn’t open on one of the wireless connections I was using).

There’s no question that telecommuting is on the rise for so many reasons: gas prices are going up, companies are looking to offer employees a better balance of work and life, the price of laptops allow companies to issue more of them, broadband is available in almost every household and a host of other reasons.

There’s also no question that telecommuting can be a good thing but there are risks. The one that comes immediately to mind is that the more laptops that are out there, the greater the chance that sensitive company data will be compromised in some way. Laptops get stolen. They’re left around for others to access. Data is stored on USB drives or other portable media and something happens to those devices. Laptops are outside the company intranet. More personal (or non-authorized) software is installed, opening up those machines to greater security risks.

As telecommuting rises, so does the potential for all of these security risks. Finding a way to keep company data secure should be on the top of everyone’s mind.

Desktop management can be really time consuming, can’t it? Even in a small company, managing a few dozen desktop machines can take a big chunk of time. In larger environments — 1,000 desktops or 10,000 desktops or more — it’s usually better but that’s only because a desktop management “process” has been put in place and it’s a team of people taking care of things. But better doesn’t mean easier or any less time consuming. 

And classic desktops — that is, a box with attached monitor, keyboard, etc. — don’t pose the biggest challenge. Updating and patching laptops that are constantly on the move (especially those used in remote offices or by a sales team that is always on the go) inevitably keep  your from ever reaching 100%.

How do you handle desktop management? Are you using desktop management tools? Do you not really worry about updating and patching all desktops all the time, instead waiting until a machine needs to be replaced or is in for something else?