Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I have a T60 Exact model: http://www5.pc.ibm.com/uk/products.nsf/ ... t#security

It has a TPS chip which I understand to have something to do with security.

Anyway, IBM told me that the chip stops the hard drive from starting without authentification. They did not say that data on the hard drive is encrypted. On the other hand a programmer friend says that it is.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

The reason I ask is that I will be travelling in high theft zones and have much sensitive work data on my laptop. A data violation would be catastrophic. I want to decide if the built in security is sufficient or if I should enable Bit Locker (Vista built in security), or maybe the security package offered by PGP.

Thank you.

I do not think the data is automatically encrypted - unless Bit Locker is turned on by default.

Te IBM Client Security Software used to allow you to manually set up encrypted drives or folders, but that function was removed from the latest version because it conflicted with Bit Locker.

If you have to be sure, use Bit Locker.

Ed Gibbs

The question is whether by default (without Bit Locker) the IBM Client Security Solution or the hardware security in the T60 encrypts the data on the hard drive? Sorry, but I just want to be clear.

Hijacking the thread a little bit, if I enable the BIOS and HD passwords, can I use the fingerprinter to authenticate myself?

phil81uk wrote:The question is whether by default (without Bit Locker) the IBM Client Security Solution or the hardware security in the T60 encrypts the data on the hard drive? Sorry, but I just want to be clear.

No, it does not encrypt data on the drive. The chip is merely a secure storage space for encryption keys. No data is encrypted by default. Windows can encrypt data if you set the encryption attribute on files, but it doesnt do this by default either.

To answer jns2001s question, you can enable fingerprint hard drive protection, though I dont think you can use the fingerprint for BIOS access (its not really necessary though since you dont access the bios very often).