My wife hates using my laptop.  There is a password to login, a password for my wireless network (both home and work), I never save any of my passwords in the browser and you need another just to be able to use my linux shell (which she would never touch anyway).

Why all this security?  No, I don’t have government secrets but assuming you know all of the passwords (an no, they aren’t all the same) you would able to access all of my work stuff.  My “work stuff” is my life and since my laptop is basically a grab-and-go piece of hardware (a small Dell Inspiron 700m) I want to make sure that if I were ever to be stolen it would basically be useless to the person who nabbed it - at least without a complete format of the hard drive and new OS installation.  I even have the BIOS password protected and the hard-drive set to the first boot device so getting a new OS installed wouldn’t be a simple process.

I don’t go so far as to encrypt my entire hard-drive because like I said, I’m not harboring government secrets, but unlike the government officials that have let their laptops “disappear” I would be willing to bet if they took even half the security measures I did the rate of data-loss due to lost laptops would drop dramatically.

How far do you take your computer security?

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