Locked in

Most of the posts on this blog comes from my problematic laptop. Recently on slashdot.org there was the announcement of the 5.0 release of Truecrypt. For a long time I've been looking for a solution to secure my files and my laptop. There has been other programs that create encrypted partitions or encrypted disk images. On windows this encrypts some of your data but rarely most of it. And for these there was no solution to secure your Local folder, where the meat of your information is (outlook.pst, thunderbird, firefox, etc). But the great thing about Truecrypt is it can do the filesystem level encryption on a running system partition. No need to boot up into a seperate system or CD and run an encryption script. In fact it makes securing your system so easy (and for laptop users, not having to swap drives around is a godsend) that there is no reason that it shouldn't be included with every computer sold. I've been using it for less that 24 hours and there hasn't been any visible performance hit (generally 5%) or lost files, or unrecoverable boots.