No dice. I am still getting the random reboots after reinstalling Windows, PGP Whole Drive Encryption and the Maxtor OneTouch software. I uninstall the Maxtor software and everything seemed to start running pretty good. The one thing that I did find is that VMware Workstation runs VERY slowly on this setup. I guess that makes should not be surprising seeing as that the drive that contains the virtual machine is located on a encrypted drive. This could also have something to do with how I create virtual machines. When setting them up, I always create the virtual disk as one file instead of breaking them up into smaller parts. Other than that I am not seeing much of a performance hit.

Well I am going to keep going on this project and will keep everyone informed.

This is one project that is getting off to a rocky start. I installed PGP Whole Disk Encryption and the Maxtor OneTouch software and started having problems with blue screens almost instantly. If the Maxtor drive is not connected to the notebook everything seems to be running pretty good, but as soon as the Maxtor backup software starts to do its thing the notebook slows down and then will blue screen after a few minutes. I am getting two to three reboots per day. This weekend I am going to reformat the notebook and reinstall Windows and the two software packages that I am trying to test.

We’ll see how this goes.

Well it has been a while since my last posting.

I have started looking at something that has been a problem at work for some time. We have fourteen users that carry notebooks. There have been way too many stories about people losing notebooks with information that shouldn’t be out of the building. We do not have any sensitive data walking around on these notebooks, but if one of them were lost they do have VPN connections back to the building. The VPN connections are based on certificates, so the users do not need passwords to connect. That means that also someone needs to get into our building is to get around the users login password. What I am looking to do is encrypt the hard drives of the notebooks, but that opens up another problem if Windows goes south. How do you get at the data? Before anyone yells backups; think about the fact that most of these users are not in the building where we can make sure that the backups are being done. This means that we have to make sure that the backup process is easy enough that it will be done. The process that we are looking at is to encrypt the drives with PGP Whole Disk Encryption and the use the Maxtor OneTouch solution for doing backups. I have installed both software packages on my notebook and will be testing them over the next several weeks to see how it works.

I’ll keep everyone posted on how this goes.