Enable BitLocker Drive Encryption with Windows 7
BitLocker is around for some years, it was introduced with Windows Vista. This first release of BitLocker could only be installed to the boot partition and was pretty hard to configure. When Vista SP1 came out an updated BitLocker saw daylight. Non-boot partitions could be encrypted in this version and some other modifications where made.
With the released of Windows 7, Microsoft improved BitLocker a lot! It’s easy to set up and easier to use. Right-click a drive in Windows Explorer and choose “Turn on BitLocker ” to encrypt a drive. This only works when your machine has a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) onboard. As most business laptops has such a chip, I will focus on that. If not, a USB stick can be used to store the encryption key. This USB stick needs to be plugged in the machine at startup.
To enable BitLocker follow this short guide.
On your Windows 7 machine, go to Control Panel, System and Security and choose BitLocker Drive Encryption. Or type “BitLocker” in the search bar and hit Enter.
I choose to apply BitLocker on my C: drive.
These two steps, shrinking drive C: and creating a system partition, weren’t applied because Windows 7 setup did them by default.
You can save your recovery key to a file, or print it out. This key is used to access your files if a problem with your computer prevents you from access them.
At this point encryption begins.
The whole encryption process took 42 minutes. While encrypting you can use your computer as normal. I even rebooted to see if this breaks the encryption process. After rebooting BitLocker picks up encryption where it was interrupted for the reboot.
As you can see my C: drive is encrypted with BitLocker. I was amazed how Microsoft improved the installation of BitLocker with Windows 7.
Another great thing about BitLocker is that it’s centrally manageable through Group Policy. It allows you to store the Recovery Key and the Recovery Password in Active Directory.
With BitLocker To Go you can encrypt external hard drives and flash disks. BitLocker To Go works completely independently of BitLocker, so you do not need to enable BitLocker on your computer, or utilize any TPM hardware, to use BitLocker To Go. However, it is similar to BitLocker and can also be enabled via a simple right-click Windows Explorer.
My conclusion is that Microsoft improved BitLocker a lot, it’s easier to use and more pleasant to work with. Give it a try yourself!
