BitLocker - First Thoughts
I turned on Vista’s BitLocker feature on my laptop last night. First I started by doing a complete PC backup. Then I turned on BitLocker. It asked me to insert a USB drive (I don’t have a TPM, read my earlier article on how to enable this) to save the encryption key. Then it asked me to save the recovery password, which I put on a second USB drive for safekeeping. Then it rebooted to ensure the key could be read upon startup. After the restart it began encrypting in the background while I was able to use my computer normally. It took about three hours to encrypt the 70′ish GB of data on my machine.
Now when I reboot my machine I have to insert the USB drive that contains the encryption key upon startup. Other than that, everything works exactly as before and I have not noticed and appreciable performance degradation.
I love it when a plan comes together. 
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