Should I encrypt my laptop

50Twuncle

I was wondering whether I should encrypt my laptop - in case it gets pinched ?
I believe that Win 10 comes with encryption now - which I presume can be carried out "on the fly" ?

kwikbreaks

If you do my bet is you'll be asking how to recover stuff from an encrypted drive sometime in the future.

http://www.howtogeek.com/234826/how-to-enable-full-disk-encryption-on-windows-10/

Jivesinger

50Twuncle wrote: »

I believe that Win 10 comes with encryption now - which I presume can be carried out "on the fly" ?

I think it's similar to Windows 8.1 which also came with device encryption.

The catch is that, unless you have the Pro version (or Enterprise and possibly others) the Device Encryption requires specific hardware, as mentioned in the article kwikbreaks linked to. I believe the OS must boot from a solid state disk for instance.

What the article doesn't mention is that you also need to have Secure Boot switched on for the Device Encryption to work.

The Pro/Enterprise versions have Bitlocker, which can be enabled on pretty much any hardware, and doesn't need Secure Boot, but I believe this is similar to Windows 7.

As to whether you should switch it on, well it can catch you out, so you really must have that recovery key somewhere. I've seen a Dell laptop where Dell's update took it upon itself to install some low level system update, which caused Bitlocker to crash and require the Recovery Key.

But it does make your data safer if your computer gets stolen.