I just encrypted the boot drive of my little MSI Wind laptop. I had never tried this feature before. It's about as simple and painless as I can imagine; quite smooth. I was surprised when it encrypted the volume while Windows was running, but after thinking about it, it's not actually surprising since it obviously has a lowest-level driver that handles the disk I/O at a sector level.
The only irritation that I hit was that it wrote out a recovery CD ISO and INSISTED that I actually burn a copy before it would proceed. It required me to insert the burned CD so it could be really sure that I actually did it. While I applaud their diligence in making users do what they should do anyway, this laptop does not actually have any removable media drives. So I installed Daemon Tools, wrote the ISO to a thumb drive and mounted it as a CD. That made it happy and let me continue.
In other news, I did my first system restore from a PING image last weekend, to put my old laptop back into pristine condition to give to a niece who needs it for school. It worked painlessly and well.
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