Encrypting data on your laptop Data encryption for files in Vista
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This article, Encrypting data on your laptop, was last updated on 30 January 2009 and is now out of date and held in our online archive for reference. Explore our latest Technology articles.
Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Enterprise have a more advanced encryption feature known as BitLocker Drive Encryption.
As well as enabling you to encrypt your data, it protects your hard drive’s boot sector, which helps to prevent potential problems when booting up your computer. To use BitLocker Drive Encryption, you’ll have to first download and run the BitLocker Preparation Tool.
Go to Start > All programs > Windows update and select BitLocker and EFS enhancements then Install. This tool will create two NTFS formatted partitions which are required for the drive encryption to work.
One partition is for the operating system on the C drive and the other partition is for the operating system to boot from (minimum size of 1.5GB). This partition will remain unencrypted, so don’t store any data here.
