My Work laptop was stolen(this is so not good)

I do security work for corporate and commercial sites. I set up the electronics that control or monitor what goes on on these sites. This was my personal laptop that I used for work because until the company I work for provided me with one. Well as luck would have it I had this laptop stolen out of my car on the way home from work when I stopped off somewhere for something to eat. My Problem is that this laptop even though It's password protected has the ability to cause allot of damage. My question is: Is there anyway to shut down the Windows 7 seven software when the laptop goes on line through windows update or via the fact that it's registered to me and all the software and hardware has been registered and updated. I would like to track it down but shutting it down would salve the major security risks this machine has the ability to exploit.

Is there hope.

Welcome Bigred469 to the windows 7 forums.

Password protecting your laptop is a false warm fuzzy as anyone can take the disk out and read it with another computer in the brute force mode. also there are many bootable cd's that will tell you all the passwords.

In other words, there is no real way to protect your laptop outside of file encryption. Also a bios strong password helps a bit but still can be broken.

There is a company that sells a product called phone home, I believe that would let you know where it was and do some things to it from remote.

If it was an apple macbook then apple has products that will do what you want.

In other words, NO, you can't do a remote wipe of your data or whatever without an installed product.

Microsoft's update is not designed to do what you want.

Sorry.

Rich