The laptop is gone: the settings you needed before, and the exact hour's protocol after

A stolen laptop is two emergencies wearing one event: the machine (replaceable hardware with a market of its own in every city) and the life inside it (the tax files, the clients' folders, the browser that remembered every password, the drive that is a copy of the family archive). The industry's entire defence against the second emergency is a handful of settings that read like afterthoughts until the morning they are the whole story - and one protocol for the first hour, which is when both recoveries live or die.

The before half, which is one evening tonight

• Full-disk encryption on: the built-in classes both platforms ship - BitLocker on modern Windows (most machines carry a recoverable version of it quietly already; the settings page states its status in one word), FileVault on the Mac - turn it on and file the recovery key where the thief cannot reach it: the account it protects does not hold it alone, a printed copy in the family's documents folder does. Encryption's plain promise: a stolen machine without it is an open drive to anyone with a screwdriver and an evening; with it, the hardware is a brick and the data is not the casualty list. The one cost: the forgotten password locks the owner out too - which is the recovery key's entire purpose.
• Find-and-lock enrolled: the account-level 'find my device' switched on for every machine the way phones have it by default now - the map is a bonus; the work it does in the real world is remote lock, the contact message on the lock screen, and the last-line erase. The sign-in, the lock, the wipe: three buttons the theft becomes survivable because of.
• The browser and the passwords: every saved password in a signed-in browser is the theft that follows the theft - the desk's minimum standard is a password manager for the accounts whose loss is not negotiable (banking, email - email first, because email is the keyring to everything else) and the two-factor app on the same accounts, so the laptop alone cannot re-derive the household. The browser's 'offer to save' declined on the banking sites is the zero-cost version of the same paragraph.
• The quiet two: the BIOS/UEFI admin password (free, five minutes, and it retires the casual reformat-and-resell convenience that makes un-passworded machines the thieves' preferred stock) and the automatic backup doing its monthly silent copies - the photo-backup page's appointment covers the work folders in the same breath; a machine whose data lives only on its own drive loses its actual contents even when everything above succeeds.

The hour it's gone, in order

1. From another device: locate, lock, message. The find page first - the map is where the decision tree branches: the location is live (the compound, a market, a route someone can walk) versus the machine offline (the wipe conversation moves up). The lock flag the account, and the contact number onto the screen - the desk's note from this country's recovery stories: a machine that can be called with a reward-and-no-questions line comes back more often than one that cannot.
2. Sign out and rotate the inner circle: the account's remote sign-out function, then the passwords for the email and the banking that were live on it - the logged-in session is the window the thief has while the encryption keeps the drive shut, so the browser and the tokens get killed before the mail is read from the machine's own address bar.
3. Wipe or wait - the call the location makes: remote erase is one-way, and a located machine on the move is a recovery conversation for the police hour below; a machine parked somewhere addressable, offline for a day, is a machine whose data has to die before it can be sold into. The account page states the wipe option plainly, and the encrypted drive plus the changed passwords is the version where a wipe is hygiene rather than triage.
4. The paperwork within the day: the police report (the extract number is what the insurer and the network's block request run on - the used-phone guide's identity-check paragraph is the same registry for a different device), the serial number from the box or the account's device list, and the insurer's theft claim form the same week the loss happens - every hour of delay is a question the form asks without an answer.

The verdict, as a rule

Encryption on, find enrolled, the password manager for the accounts that hurt, the firmware lock, the monthly backup - one evening, all five, tonight. And the hour-after order: locate, lock and message, sign out and rotate, wipe only the branch the map chooses, paperwork in daylight. The machine was rented from you by the warranty of habit; the life inside it is the part this page exists to make unrecoverable-to-strangers - which the thief's brick and the family's untouched archive is, in the industry's own quiet jargon, called a good outcome.