Instructions: Start Blue Lock, and after about half a minute a list of discovered Bluetooth devices will be displayed in the window on the right of the screen. Click on a device (you may have to wait a while as the GUI is frozen whilst the Bluetooth driver is scanning for devices - increase the timeout to increase the chances of discovering your device) and its ID and hardware address will be copied to the "Lock Device" field at the bottom of the screen. The program will now loop continuously, and if that device is not detected the system will immediately lock up. The system locking is a standard Windows API call and is perfectly safe, it's just the same as if you locked the system with CTRL-ALT-DEL. Note that many Bluetooth devices have a long range and therefore it may still detect your device even if you are the other end of the office! I was hoping it would be possible to detect signal strength but this doesn't seem possible :-(
Configuration: It is possible to reconfigure the default settings by editing bluelock.conf, see the comments in the file for details.
Blue Lock can also be configured to launch an external program when it locks your system, e.g. to delete those incriminating files ;-) ... simply edit the property launchOnLock in bluelock.conf.
If your device isn't found Note - I get a lot of emails along the lines of "My phone [model X] isn't recognised, please help" - unfortunately I can't possibly test this software against every Bluetooth device, so if your phone/bluetooth adapter isn't recognised there isn't a great deal I can do. In Blue Lock 1.7 I have made various search parameters configurable so you can try experimenting with these - the values are documented at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa362925.aspx and are represented by a set of checkboxes.
Also, I have found that if you install VinsVision's "Additional Bluetooth Drivers for Microsoft Bluetooth in Windows XP SP2" at http://www.vinsvision.com/Articles/tabid/66/EntryID/13/Default.aspx there is a good chance that your device will be recognised. However, this means you will now be using the Microsoft Bluetooth stack which might be more limited than the one you have installed already - make sure you have your original Bluetooth drivers available in case you need to reinstall them.
If you have any questions or want to report a bug please drop me a line at
