Theft protection system that can survive a fomatting?

I have been asked to search for a system to get info from our stolen PCs* and gives us info to recover them.

I have searched the web and there are plenty of systems, but most of them rely in a program running in the OS. The trouble is that our systems have a corporate login/static IP and a bunch of particularities, so I must assume that stolen PCs will be formatted before being put to use.

So far the only system that I have found that looks like what I need is Computrace from Absolute Software. Intel Anti-Theft technology is not useful because most of the PCs to protect are desktops.

So the questions are:

• Can someone point me to similar products that can track a PC after being formatted. I am a little surprised that I only could find Computrace.
• Has anybody had any experience with Computrace? Was the PC formatted?

*1 I do not mean that we stole them; they will be stolen from us sometime in the future. :-)

Any anti-theft system that can survive disk formatting must use specialized hardware.

Some solutions are :

• Computrace technology : not limited to laptops, see for example Dell BIOS-enabled models
• BIOS passwords (for computers using flash EEPROM for BIOS it's almost impossible to erase)
• Fingerprint sensor or smart card authentication (although these are more software-oriented)

I have seen this highly recommended on various forums

http://preyproject.com/

If you have backups of the data why does it matter if they survive formatting?, once stolen they are usually not recovered unless they are laptops with bios level theft protection.