Win8 and MSE

[BenCasey]

Hello,
Just taken delivery of a new PC with Win8.
There doesn't seem to be a Win8 MSE options on the MS Site.
Is this correct? or is it located elsewhere.
Thanks

[HansV]

Windows 8 comes with a version of Microsoft Security Essentials built in, but it is now called Windows Defender. This is confusing, since Windows Defender is also the name of a much weaker security product for Windows 7 and earlier.

[BenCasey]

aha! Yes, it is confusing. I can remember that product from ages ago.
It also has Bit Locker. Any idea what that does?
Thanks

[StuartR]

Bit locker does whole drive encryption

[BobH]

Does anyone have any experience with Bit Locker or any other whole drive encryption software? I wonder what, if any, noticeable effect it has on performance.

[Jay Freedman]

I've used BitLocker To Go on a USB stick that I carry around in my pocket; if it's lost or stolen, no one else will be able to read it without the password. It doesn't appear to have any effect on performance, although the snail-like pace of USB 2.0 isn't much of a testing environment.

There seem to be some concerns about what happens when you make an image backup of an encrypted drive. For example, some backup programs (such as Acronis True Image) let you treat an image file as a mountable drive so you can copy individual files from it. I don't know whether that's still possible if it's an image of an encrypted drive. I'm not interested in using BitLocker on my hard drives, so I have no incentive to find out the answer.

[StuartR]

I use TrueCrypt on my D: partition, where all my data resides. It doesn't have a noticeable performance impact.

[BenCasey]

Hello StuartR,
Yes, it appears to be ok for basic installations but other users elsewhere have cautioned about using it if multi-booting or using multi-OS's

[BobH]

Thanks, Stuart!

I might give it a try and see what happens (on a back up, of course).