Comment by Anthony-G
2 days ago
Fair points. Thankfully, I haven't had any of those issues.
I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN.
Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often.
For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need.
Thanks for that!
If it's a Win11 machine with Secure Boot then there is a high chance it has Bitlocker on by default. You should probably check and disable it if you don't want it. It'll be a little faster, and easier to recover if anything goes wrong.
I bought her the laptop a few years ago from a local, independent retailer who also specialise repairs as I try to support local trade and retailers as much as possible. It came with Windows 10 and the retailers had configured it with local user account authentication (no microsoft.com account), removed the advertising and other annoyances and without Bitlocker. She has since upgraded to Windows 11 but it works mostly the same (without obnoxious advertising and distractions).