Tech at Play

I decided to bite the bullet last weekend and activated BitLocker encryption on my Windows Vista Enterprise laptop.  Before you start looking for the BitLocker option in your Control Panel, this is only available for the Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows Vista.

Anyway, what the process does is encrypt my primary hard disk partition. Essentially, because the encryption key is kept securely on the TPM chip in the laptop, it will no longer be possible to access it by using the old trick of removing the hard disk drive and connecting it to another machine as a secondary device.

Of course, if you own a Sony Z, you will know that cracking it open to take out the hard disk in the first place is definitely not for the faint of heart!

For more information about BitLocker and why it might for you, do check out my SMB blog over at ITBusinessEdge.com where I elaborated about why BitLocker is relevant and how it works.  I also talked a lot more about my experiences with BitLocker so far, so you might want to check it out too.

Anyway, you can see the encryption process from the next couple of screenshots below.  With more than 100GB of data on my hard disk, it is a long and tedious process, even though I am running a 256GB Samsung solid state disk when doing it.

Finally, after more than four hours on an SSD, you can see from the below screenshot that my volume is now fully protected by BitLocker.  Well, the other reason why I decided to enable BitLocker is that I am returning the review SSD from Samsung, and I have no idea if a standard data wipe is effective or if it would damage the SSD.

Getting the entire partition encrypted is a simple and pretty robust way of ensuring that my data stay confidential. Well, until someone discover a way to crack AES, that is.

Despite the long initial encryption process – it is100GB of data after all – I have not felt any discernible lag in my laptop after BitLocker was enabled. As such, I will certainly be using it with my next SSD to protect my privacy. Feel free to post any questions you might have on BitLocker below.

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