pcarbon02 Posted April 7, 2009 Share Posted April 7, 2009 Hi I am looking for the best software to use to encrypt my whole hard disk on my laptop.I have an HP Pavillion running Vista Home Premium 64 Bit (with SP2 RC1).In looking for a solution I have found TrueCrypt recommended different places. I just wanted to check and see if people here agree that it is a good program.I dont really want to pay Microsoft another $150 to upgrade to Ultimate to get Bit Locker or whatever encryption they have on there.Patrick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tarun Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 BitLocker is probably your best bet as you'll have support for it if needed. Though from what I have heard TrueCrypt is great too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pcarbon02 Posted April 13, 2009 Author Share Posted April 13, 2009 That is true. If I upgrade to Ultimate, the encryption would have the benefit of being integral to the OS.I have a question about TrueCrypt if anyone knows the answer...If you only use encrypted containers (as opposed to whole drive encryption), what do you do about paging files, memory dumps, temporary files, etc?I am using an HP laptop that I plan on using for school. However I keep everything on my laptop (including all my financial info and passwords to all my financial websites). In the chance that my laptop is stolen wouldn't I want to just encrypt the entire system?Maybe it takes a lot of know-how to find information in temporary files and that sort of thing... I don't work for the CIA so it's not like EVERYTHING I look at on my computer is sensitive information. I just dont want to have to scramble to change every credit and bank account I have if my laptop were stolen.I am running Vista Home Premium SP2 RC1 64 Bit. System is a P7450 Cure 2 Duo 2.13 Ghz, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD NVidia 9200M Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tarun Posted April 13, 2009 Share Posted April 13, 2009 You could optionally put all of your important data on a home desktop (assuming you have one) and make the laptop school only. You may get better results making a new topic in the software section about TrueCrypt. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted April 13, 2009 Share Posted April 13, 2009 For those "laptops with sensitive information" cases, we've been using EFS for ages (encrypting filesystem), but it seems like BitLocker is the new flavor. One warning: if you lose the decryption keys, kiss your data goodbye (EFS had recovery keys though) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
na5m Posted April 21, 2009 Share Posted April 21, 2009 without a doubt, go with BitLocker.efs is great, but many times, sensitive info can leak out to non-efs.going with full BDE (BitLocker Drive Encryption) eliminates this possibility.even the pagefile gets encrypted. each & every bit on every partition you BitLockergets encrypted. don't be afraid of BitLocker. just do it. you'll thank yourselfand the peace of mind you'll get will be a happy side effect. only one caveat:keep a copy of your key(s) and recovery password(s) in a secure place in caseyou lose the originals. i like to put them all in a compressed folder (which is really just a zip file) and then encryptthis folder using gpg. keep this encrypted zip file on anemail server in case you need them in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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