I have been using true crypt for a long time. The smarter, easier thing to do is to just create the entire physical drive encrypted with true crypt. It will take some time to originally encrypt if you have 100's of gigs like me, but once your done it's tight. I have a netbook with with a 160gb HD and I encrypted the whole drive and it ran flawlessly. It will encrypt everything and when your computer gets restarted, unplugged, reset, whatever, it will be automatically be unmounted and when the system starts up again it will prompt you for a password before even the OS splash screen. Forget that password and you yourself are screwed so DON'T FORGET IT. I was encrytping using all three algorithms AES, TwoFish, and Serpent and my master password is 116bit alone. I definitely use this on my laptop because I take it places with me. Much much much safer than an unencrypted regular laptop getting stolen / lost. You are screwed in that case. Also you can use true crypt on removable media like flash drives, external hard drives and more. HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT