I was robbed last year and a great deal of my toys were taken and pawned for insultingly low amounts of money. Drugs were the culprit and the case is still being tried in court. My gear is aging without being used as I cannot get it back until the court case is over and someone is convicted. Until that time it is on dusty shelves in a pawn shop, waiting to be dropped, dusted and abused. 

Basically, the whole process has been very frustrating for my family and I, and has sucked up great deal of my time. Thanks for letting me whine to you.

I saw on Engadget a year or so ago that somebody had been robbed, but had set up a webcam to record the whole ordeal with motion video while he was out of the house. This footage was used for evidence in the case. This was probably fairly complex to set up at the time but now it can be done easily.

Logitech is offering a free Vista Sidebar Gadget that will be a great help in setting up such a security system in our own house. The gadget will detect movement in the room and trigger your computer to record video until movement stops. It then automatically saves the footage as an AVI file.

With webcams being so cheap and the software being free, it is well worthwhile to set this up for yourself. The only downside to this is that if your computer goes missing too, you have lost the footage. You may be able to put the footage up on an FTP site or the like to bypass this problem.

I have not been able to test if it works for all webcams or only Logitechs range of webcams. What have you got to lose in trying it out though. The software is free. If all does go to plan, you will be laughing.

Get it from the Logitech Website.