Introduction

Geolocation is the usage of various data to estimate the location of a device or PC.

Various software attempts to do geolocation for reasons such as serving location-specific data, access restrictions, etc.

This guide describes how geolocation works on Softdrive Cloud PCs, which are located in datacenters, rather than on a device in front of you.

Geolocation Methods

There are two primary methods for geolocation:

1. Windows Location
2. IP Geolocation

Windows Location

This is intended for devices that can be moved, like laptops. You can search "Location" in the Windows search bar to go to the relevant settings page. You can either disable this, or set a desired default location (e.g. to where you are located). This cannot update automatically as there is no GPS-type of function in the Cloud PC. We may automatically update this to match the connecting device's location, in a future update of our software. This is the location that would show in the Microsoft Weather module, for example.

IP Geolocation

Some services attempt to identify the location of a device based on the reported public IP address. This can be misleading for a variety of reasons, but you can check this by going to ip.me. (Can just enter "ip.me" into Google search). Then, you can go to www.whois.com and search for the IP address from ip.me to see additional details about the registration info. By default, our public IPs are from Oracle, and they have a pool of public IPs registered in various places (mostly in the US).