Quick Look: lock your computer remotely with Phoenix Freeze

Ever wish your computer was just a bit more epic, or that that it would show a bit more camaraderie? After all, the two of you spend hours upon hours together surfing JAMM.mobi and yet when you walk away it’s as if your computer doesn’t even notice you’re gone. There are already products out there that can remotely switch your screen or computer off based on your proximity, but none of them have a name as cool as “Phoenix Freeze”.

Aside from the name, Freeze also sounds cool because of its purported ease-of-use. You install the program, reboot your computer, pair it with a Bluetooth-enabled phone, and then walk away and watch your computer sulk and lock itself up.

You can set things like the minimum distance to lock or unlock the computer, but I can only seem to get the locking to work. The computer has unlocked itself a whole two times, and I’ve tried playing with all the the sliders in the Freeze settings. No dice. I then set the sliders back to their defaults and walked away from my computer painfully slowly, just in case I needed to be at a precise distance to unlock the computer. I just ended up looking stupid, walking backwards away from my computer holding an iPhone up in the air like a torch. Oh well, at least the manual unlock works: just type in your windows password and you’re good to go.

So far it seems as though Phoenix has gotten the freezing mechanism down pretty well, but the rising from the ashes bit could still use some work. It’s certainly still a useful program even if it just unlocks your computer, but there is a downside. If you’re using a Bluetooth input device like a mouse or keyboard, then the Phoenix is going to kick it out as it roosts in your computer (you can’t use HID’s alongside Freeze). Another minor pain is the fact that the system tray icon doesn’t always react to mouse clicks. This means that changing Freeze settings requires you to go into the task manager, kill the Freeze.exe process, and then reload the program.

If you’re interested in giving Freeze a shot then you can use the same 14-day trial that I did. If you want to buy the program, the only way to do so is through the “buy now” button. Freeze costs about $12 CAD. I’m going to hold off for now, but it is a very cool concept (JAMM writers are soooo clever).