In short, no, because there's no way to tell a service to turn on without access to the machine. Nothing will know your laptop is stolen unless you can tell it.

In short, no, because there's no way to tell a service to turn on without access to the machine. Nothing will know your laptop is stolen unless you can tell it. To do that there has to be a service listening for a specific command. To do that, it has to be running all the time, which is what you don't want. Even if you wrote your own (which you can do) it would still have to be running 24/7.