Windows 7 Feature - BitLocker Drive Encryption

How can you help protect your data from loss, theft, or hackers? The answer: BitLocker.

Improved for Windows 7 and available in the Ultimate and Enterprise editions, BitLocker helps keep everything from documents to passwords safer by encrypting the entire drive that Windows and your data reside on. Once BitLocker is turned on, any file you save on that drive is encrypted automatically.

BitLocker To Go—a new feature of Windows 7—gives the lockdown treatment to easily-misplaced portable storage devices like USB flash drives and external hard drives. 

Set up your hard disk for BitLocker Drive Encryption

To encrypt the drive that Windows is installed on, your computer must have two partitions: a system partition (which contains the files needed to start your computer) and an operating system partition (which contains Windows). The operating system partition will be encrypted and the system partition will remain unencrypted so your computer can start. 

In previous versions of Windows, you might have had to manually create these partitions. In this version of Windows, these partitions are created automatically. If your computer does not have a system partition, the BitLocker wizard will create one for you using 200 MB of available disk space. The system partition will not be assigned a drive letter and will not show up in the Computer folder.

What is encryption?

Encryption is a way to enhance the security of a message or file by scrambling the contents so that it can be read only by someone who has the right encryption key to unscramble it. For example, if you purchase something from a website, the information for the transaction (such as your address, phone number, and credit card number) is usually encrypted to help keep it safe. Use encryption when you want a strong level of protection for your information.