Let’s say someone steals your laptop. Could they see your data? Should you even care? Probably. First, there’s the issue of identity theft. (You *don’t* have all your passwords in an unsecured word processing file, do you? Please say no.) But what about private emails, identities of those working in secure places, and — who knows what else. But, you have a sign-on password, right? Actually, that might not help much. The brute-force solution is… they just take your laptop apart and move the hard drive over to THEIR machine. Rats. So what’s the best way to prevent prying eyes from seeing your data? It just might be VeraCrypt. Learn more at…
https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/

What’s he price? Free. Yup. It’s open source and very transparent. The smart guys among us can study the thing and see openly what makes it tick. That’s a good thing. But installed, it’s hard to beat. However, it does take some knowledge and time to get it working. What’s the second-best solution for the money? The one that might already be installed on your laptop. Some versions of Windows (mainly ‘pro’ versions) come with a VPN called Bitlocker.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732774(v=ws.11).aspx

It’s *pretty* good — partly because, if you’ve got it, it’s free. And it’s soooooooo easy. You mainly just turn it on. The *only* possible downside is that, since it’s Microsoft, it just *might* be back-doored by the countries with whom Microsoft wants a competitive edge. (They might have given away a secret combination to the countries they wanted to market.) Nobody knows this for sure — but we can’t possibly rule it out. Therefore, *somebody* might have a way to break Bitlocker.

Bottom line? Use Veracrypt if you can figure it out. But at least use Bitlocker. Do you have a different (better?) solution? Please comment below the web version this item. (And thanks for your input, Greg!)