BANGALORE, INIDA: Windows 7 builds upon the strong security lineage of Windows Vista and comes with some enhancements in its hard drive encryption scheme called BitLocker. One among them is BitLocker to go, which lets users encrypt their portable flash drives.

Windows 7: All you want to know

Setting up BitLocker To Go on a USB drive is very simple. All you need is to right click on the USB drive in 'My Computer' and select the 'Turn On BitLocker' command from the menu. This will prompt you to set up a a password that you will use to unlock the drive, or use the PIN of your smart card. This means, either you can use a simple password to encrypt your data or you can use your corporate smart card for decrypting your pen drive.

Jazz up your apps on Windows 7

After you set up a password or use a smart card, BitLocker To Go will prompt you to store a recovery key to unlock your drive in the event you forget the password or lose your smart card. As you store the recovery key, you'll be prompted to begin the encryption process. Press 'Start Encryption' and it will encrypt the drive. The amount of time that it will take to complete the process will depend on how large the drive is and also on the available processing power.

The enhancements
One very significant change in Windows 7 is changing of the default partitioning scheme of BitLocker. By default, BitLocker needs a separate 1.5 GB partition which it uses for booting the machine and is not encrypted. Installing BitLocker in Vista used to be very difficult without creating this partition. You had to either create that partition by using some utilities or reformat and reinstall the entire OS again. This was because Vista by default used to create just one partition for both installing the OS and booting the machine.

With Windows 7, this problem has been taken care of. Win 7 by default creates whatever partitions are required for BitLocker and you don't need to do any kind of modification on your partition to deploy it. The interface of BitLocker is also more simplified now. You just need to right click on your hard drive and select 'Turn On BitLocker', or use the BitLocker option through the control panel.