Technically, this would be Whole Drive Encryption Part 4: I just wanted to update you all that I’m still running well with whole drive encryption with no noticeable overhead on my system. I’m playing with fire though, because I’m writing to you from Panera again. You may recall that this was where I … um… tested the hardiness of my old ThinkPad! Yeah, it was a test to see how it could stand up to some damage. Right.
I reported that there were no casualties from the coffee + laptop test, right? Well, there was 1 casualty. I thought at first it was this nifty LED darklight that comes on the top of the screen so that you can see yourself typing in the dark (without using a back-light on the keyboard which would be more expensive). Turns out, the light works fine. Its the PgUp key that has the problem. It doesn’t like to register that I pressed it very often and the key combo to turn on the LED is Fn + PgUp. Ahh well, if you ever see some dude in the corner of Panera hammering away at the corner of his keyboard like Linus from Peanuts having a seizure, its just me trying to turn on (or off) my nightlight.
TrueCrypt with whole drive encryption has been, as I said earlier, great. There is a bit of getting used to the fact that I have to type in a 22 character password before I can boot the computer - so I often turn it on and come back after getting coffee with it prompting me not for my windows password, but the TrueCrypt one. I only mistype it about once or twice a week, which isn’t bad considering how often I power on/off this device.
And I finish this post up with words you can live by: “Coffee plus wind pipe = :(” yeah, I just inhaled the coffee. Maybe Panera is bad for my health.
