Windows 7

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips

You never know when you might lose your smartphone, and with it all your personal contacts and data.  Windows Phone comes with a cool feature that will let you locate, lock and erase your handset from anywhere with an Internet Connection.  This feature is pretty well hidden in the OS and you’ll find it lurking under “Find my Phone” in the handset’s settings.

To get the system to work properly you should tick at least the first option here, Save my location periodically for better mapping.  This feature will help you to locate your phone should it be lost and, say, the battery dies.

The online settings will bring up a map of the phone’s last reported location if it can’t find the current location of your handset.  You will then have additional options including activating a special ring on the phone which will sound for a minute or so.  If you select this feature the phone will ring even if it has been set to silent or vibrate.  This can be very useful if you simply can’t find your phone at home (I once found my mobile phone under a pile of towels in the airing cupboard, I’d obviously had it in my hand when I put them away).

You can access the Find my Phone settings directly at windowsphone.live.com though if you are already in Live.com and want to navigate your way through this is how you can do it.

Hover your mouse over the Windows Live link in the top right of your screen at Live.com and from the drop down menu, select Mobile

2) On the next screen, you will see the box below, click on the Go to the Homepage for your Phone link.

3) At this point you are taken through the main Live screen for your phone where you can manage all manner of additional services for your handset including Xbox Live, OneNote, your Calendar, Contacts and Photographs.  This is also a useful page packed full of features.  You’ll want to click on the Find my Phone link here.

4) Finally you’ll be taken to the screen below where you will have a range of options available to you.

The Map it option is excellent and is very accurate I have found in my own tests.  You can typically track the phone down to an area just a few dozen metres across, easily enough to determine which coffee shop or bar you were in when it went missing.

The Lock it option might be of the most use to people as you can type in a custom message of up to 160 characters to display on the screen.  For instance you can give an alternate phone number for people to call.  You can also ring the phone when you lock it to get the attention of whoever might be in possession of the handset at the time.  Windows Live can later be used to unlock the handset.

If you’re completely certain though that you will never get the phone back you can force it to perform a factory reset using the Erase it option.  This will erase all your personal account, contact and other information and return the phone to its factory state.

These are very useful settings for Windows Phone but, sadly, not very well publicised ones so I would argue that the majority of Windows Phone users won’t even know that they exist.  With the ‘Mango’ update nothing has been done to address this so I can only hope that in a future release of the operating system Microsoft make it more obvious to users that the feature exists and how it can be useful to them if they lose their handset or if it is stolen.

How to Find, Lock and Erase your Windows Phone Remotely is a post from Windows 7 News & Tips – Latest Microsoft Windows 7 News, Tips, Themes, Wallpapers & Guides. Visit Windows 7 News & Tips for the Latest Microsoft Windows 7 News, Tips, Themes, Wallpapers & Guides.