[stomachmonkey]

If you think about it they are not doing a trace.

How many hundreds of millions of copies of Windows are out there? They shipped 100 million copies of 8 and 60+ million are activated.

If they phoned home every time they came online and you ran a trace route on each one?

Then what do you do with the data? Store it? For how long? Do you store every address a mobile device has ever shown up with or just the last X?

Finding your laptops IP address would be the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Now there are 3rd party services that do what you want but you need to pay for it and install the solution before the device goes missing.