Advice about Bitlocker and usb startup

Piplup · 10 May 2012

Hi to all, I'm new of this forum, and I think is very well organized, so try to be part of this community will be a good choice...
Sorry if my english could be bad but english is not my motherlanguage

I have a new pc, and I have very very very meddlers relatives...
I have to lock my PC so I could have a relative high protection from them...so they can't access my pics, or read my facebook pm etc etc...
I know that I totally secure system doesn't exist but I think that with some good subterfuge we can deny their access to the machine...

I'd like to have a system with windows 7 because it will be used primary for playing and to watch videos, and troll around facebook...nothing more than this...
On the PC will be my first account as admin and I don't know if I will create a guest account
I'd like that on boot phase, the system ask me an usb key just to be sure that no one can access to the logon screen..about this I know that bitlocker, included in W7 ultimate, can do this if I encrypt the entire partition, but I think that encypt the entire drive could bring some performace issue, and I don't want it..I just need that photo, and maybe browser are securely stored...

Do you have some advice to make the pc at least a bit inaccessible to user that what to use it when I'm not in my room?

So to sum up:

I'd like to have an usb key that works like a "smart card" (I need software advice to make this) to boot the system, and encrypt the disk or a part of the disk to make incaccessible sensible data like pics or browser history and saved password I know that bitlocker can help me in both things but I don't know if could degrade system performance...
Or I can use W7 Home Basic + TrueCrypt...

Thanks in advace for your precious advice

Piplup · 11 May 2012

no one please?

n0th1n9 · 13 May 2012

Hello Piplup.
First, I would like to say welcome to Seven forums, now for the content of my knowledge.
I use Bitlocker on both my desktop and laptop using the 256 bit with diffuser and haven’t seen any slowdowns. Depending on the method of your choice you can encrypt partitions or whole disks, if you encrypt the main partition that Windows is installed on you can unlock via USB, or just password protect your secondary partitions. Any secondary partitions will not auto unlock unless the main partition is also encrypted.
I suggest storing your files on a secondary partition instead of the main windows partition. On the secondary partition you can also create a password that will allow you to unlock the drive. This is the best practice especially if you have to re-install windows, you don’t have to re-encrypt the secondary partitions and the password to unlock will always be the same.