The Saturday New York Times says I should use BitLocker. OK. A little poking around seems to indicate the the program is already installed on Windows 10. Or perhaps only on Enterprise Win 10, I am not sure.
In any case, I have checked and my computer has a TPM chip.
So I open Control Panel to go to System & Security, but there is no such thing. At this point i am stuck.
As I have to use a password to open my computer, I suppose it is possible I already have BitLocker or something turned on already.
Either pay to upgrade windows, or look into alternatives like true crypt or similar. But please double check with Microsoft support first, there might be a way to get bitlocker on home edition, perhaps.
Before turning it on, make sure you have not only a full backup but a regular backup policy as encrypted drives are typically unrecoverable in case of corruption.
My understanding is that “device encryption” is a limited version of Bitlocker that is available on Windows 10 Home, but it only works with TPM. I haven’t been able to get it to work on my laptop. Also, I think it only works for the boot drive.
For external drives though, Windows Home can open (decrypt) a Bitlocker locked drive. So you just need access to one computer with Windows Pro. After you enable Bitlocker on the drive on a Windows Pro computer, you can connect it to a Windows Home computer and Bitlocker works on that drive. I don’t think you need TPM for this.
Also, there is a small chance that a TPM chip is on your computer, but the driver for it is not installed. Check the spec sheet for your computer, and/or see if there are any “unknown” devices in Device Manager.
For an incredibly low standard of “viable”. For example, certain security issues were found in the last r/w release of TrueCrypt that have been fixed in VeraCrypt.
When you’re talking about cryptographic security, you don’t use software that’s been abandoned by the developers for odd reasons.