In common with\u00a0many small business owners (indeed any business owner, it could be argued), my wife needs to be sure that her\u00a0customer’s data is adequately protected. In her case that means\u00a0professional cloud services for email (Office 365) and PC backup (Azure) but the data on the PC needs to be protected too…<\/p>\n
All major operating systems come with whole drive encryption technologies these days – and for Windows that feature is BitLocker.<\/p>\n
When we replaced my wife’s\u00a0PC a few months ago, I picked what seemed a good small business laptop from Lenovo – a Thinkpad E550 – and, by and large, I’ve been pleased with the purchase. \u00a0Somewhat frustratingly though, the PC shipped with Windows 8 (not Pro) and so it has been\u00a0updated to Windows 8.1 then to Windows 10 Home<\/a>. That meant that, when I attempted to encrypt the drive by right-clicking in File Explorer,\u00a0there was no Manage BitLocker<\/strong>\u00a0option (and the BitLocker Settings<\/strong> stub in Settings<\/strong>, System<\/strong>, About<\/strong> didn’t do anything). Folder-level encryption with the Encrypted File System (EFS) was similarly unavailable (although\u00a0greyed out, rather than invisible), even when I tried to manually enable it<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0 Whilst there are alternatives available<\/a>, my support model for my wife’s PC is KISS (“keep it simple, stupid”), as the last thing I need whilst I’m consulting with my own customers is to be worrying about support issues with family devices, so I decided to stick with the technology that’s built into Windows. That meant an upgrade to\u00a0Windows 10 Pro<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thinking $99 isn’t too bad a price to pay (after all, this is a business expense for my wife)… I clicked Settings<\/strong>, Update & Security<\/strong>, Activation<\/strong>, Go to Store<\/strong>, only to find that it’s \u00a399.99 in the UK – a \u00a333, or 50%, uplift at today’s exchange rates. By this point I’m starting to feel a little ripped off… although I’m not sure if I’m more annoyed with\u00a0Lenovo selling a small business PC with an inadequate version of Windows, or Microsoft for only putting encryption in the high-end Windows versions…<\/p>\n “Adding features”… more specifically \u00a399.99 to enable encryption; watch the Windows version when buying a new PC! pic.twitter.com\/4pVTuer27P<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) January 2, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nsc config EFS start= demand<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n