So I recently acquired a new notebook and I of course wanted the notebook to be secure. When I say secure I’m not just talking about preventing someone from exploiting the notebook from the wild but the problem of physical security with regards to someone stealing it. There are a number of commercial tools out there to provide whole disk encryption (WDE) but I really did not want to spend the money so I decided to get TrueCrypt a shot. I’ve been using it for sometime to encrypt data on a few backup drives I have but never a system drive. The process is completely painless. I decided to stick with the AES algorithm since it’s less hardware intense but be aware there are stronger encryption schemes available from the product. I also recommend making a backup disk and testing it! Secondly do NOT lose your key or you will not get into the system so it may be ideal to make backups and place them on another medium just in case…

At this point I’m rather happy with TrueCrypt the performance is great and how cool is it having the piece of mind that if someone decides to take your hardware, it is currently impossible for them to retrieve your data.