Three Simple Steps to Protect Your Laptop

A laptop is a portable thing...easy to carry...but also easy to lose. The physical laptop is easy to replace (assuming you have the $$ to replace it).

How much is your data worth? All those family pictures. The tunes. The documents. How much time would it take to recreate all of that? Or would you be able to?

"Best practices" would be to make sure that your data is safe. This is even more important when you have a laptop (or carry around a USB hard drive). And it doesn't matter what operating system you use.

Here's three things to do:

1) Encrypt your data. If the data is lost, it won't be accessible.
2) Use a Power On password, along with a login password. And make it one that is not easily guessable. Although a login password can be 'cracked', the power-on password is harder to crack (not impossible, just harder).
3) Back up your data. Copy your "My Documents" folder to a CD/DVD or an external hard drive that you leave at home. Keep that backup copy in a separate secure area.

These are not absolute protections, since each could be defeated with some effort. Encrypting the data is probably the most important (to prevent access if your computer is stolen). Backing up is next in importance. Power-on and login passwords will help prevent access to your data.

You might also want to consider changing the 'boot order' on your computer so that it just boots from the hard disk. Many systems by default will boot from floppy or CD first. I can put a bootable CD in your computer, and run a program that will grab your login passwords.

But if you have a power-on password (that is strong), change the boot order (to only allow boot from hard disk), and encrypted the data, I've got some fairly strong protection.

And if the laptop goes away, my backup copies have protected my data.

Don't just think about physical protection of your laptop (or PDA, or USB stick, or...). Protecting the data from loss is also important.