Hard Drive Encryption

Question

I have a new HP laptop 2540p and was wondering how hard is it to encrypt the whole hard drive?

Does it slow boot time? Does it make loading programs take longer?

You have to enter a password at boot time I take it right and then it decrypts the harddrive right.

What can I use to do this? TrueCrypt I know does encryption but are there other services that might work better. I am new to whole disk encryption.

EDIT: I only have profession so it looks like I'll have to go TrueCrypt since you need ulti or ent for bitlocker with M$ which makes no sense...

Answer 1

How difficult it may be is relative to your degree of computing experience. TrueCrypt offers (I believe) walk-through menus, so I would be comfortable saying it not a difficult experience http://www.truecrypt.org/. Potentially your boot times may be slower, however the degree to which they will be affected may be so slight that you will not notice it. Post-boot experience isn't affected.

Answer 2

There is BitLocker available aside from TrueCrypt.

Answer 3

Since you are using Windows 7, you could try BitLocker - encryption built into the system (I believe you need Professional or Ultimate version, but I may be wrong).

According to the Technet article, it

imposes a single-digit percentage performance overhead.