- Oct 7, 2005
- 2,777
- 3
- 76
I'm debating whether I want to pony up the extra bucks for Vista Ultimate to get BitLocker. What little sensitive data I have (password files mostly) is already encrypted, usually with KeePass or TrueCrypt.
I realize I'm not a high priority target, and that if my laptop does get lost/stolen it's unlikely to undergo a rigorous offline attack, but I'm curious to hear if anyone has any insight into the matter. The biggest concern seems to be that any random chunk of memory could get paged out to disk and left there for someone else to recover. Is this a legitimate concern, or only for the hyper-paranoid? Any way to mitigate or eliminate the risk?
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I was bored over the weekend, so I went for it. I haven't seen much written about Bitlocker, so I figured I'd share a few thoughts:
Overall, the process was fairly painless. Having to repartition from the command line before you install is a bit annoying, but went smoothly.
After that it's all pretty straightforward. Install Ultimate to the big partition. Go to the Bitlocker control panel page and and hit the On button (this initialized the TPM and encrypts the drive, which took a few hours). Reboot and there you go.
The amazing thing is that the HD Tune benchmarks I got were pretty much identical to this guy's, with slightly higher CPU usage (~6%). All in all, not bad.
I realize I'm not a high priority target, and that if my laptop does get lost/stolen it's unlikely to undergo a rigorous offline attack, but I'm curious to hear if anyone has any insight into the matter. The biggest concern seems to be that any random chunk of memory could get paged out to disk and left there for someone else to recover. Is this a legitimate concern, or only for the hyper-paranoid? Any way to mitigate or eliminate the risk?
===
I was bored over the weekend, so I went for it. I haven't seen much written about Bitlocker, so I figured I'd share a few thoughts:
Overall, the process was fairly painless. Having to repartition from the command line before you install is a bit annoying, but went smoothly.
After that it's all pretty straightforward. Install Ultimate to the big partition. Go to the Bitlocker control panel page and and hit the On button (this initialized the TPM and encrypts the drive, which took a few hours). Reboot and there you go.
The amazing thing is that the HD Tune benchmarks I got were pretty much identical to this guy's, with slightly higher CPU usage (~6%). All in all, not bad.