Adeona is free software to help you track the location of your notebook & desktop computer that may have been lost or stolen. (Shhh.. You may also use this to know the current whereabouts of your spouse via his or her laptop.)

Adeona, that weighs less than 3 MB, is currently available for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux but going forward, it can become available for iPhone & Windows Mobile phones also.

The idea is simple - you just install the Adeona client on your laptop and it does the rest. The software runs in the background and will upload the current IP address of your computer as soon as it is connect to the Internet.

This can work because, in most cases, the geographic location of a missing laptop can be successfully determined from the IP address alone.

When the stolen computer goes online, it send a message with its own IP address on to the web and you can retrieve this information from any other computer by running the Adeona Recovery tool shown here.

Mac users enjoy another advantage - Adeona on a Macbook will also upload pictures of people who use that computer via the built-in camera and iSightCapture.

Adeone worked brilliant in a quick test run - it provided me both the internal and external IP address of the computer along with location of nearby routers. See this log:

As you would have guessed, there’s a limitation though - if someone disables the Adeona process before connecting to the Internet, the system won’t work as expected but still, its something worth considering.

Adeona, which is named after a Roman Goddess of “safe return”, is developed by researchers at University of Washington.

Related: Protect Your Laptop Against Theft