Should I diasble/remove Bitocker on my laptop?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve had my Dell XPS-13 laptop for almost a year, and I’ve just realized that Bitlocker was turned on by default when I got it. This annoyed me because of a recent negative experience I had with the program.

My mother had an old computer that was running very, very slowly, so I bought her a new Dell All-in-One, which I assumed would perform much better, despite being a fairly basic machine. For her purposes, mostly Web browsing, it should have been fine.

To my dismay, it was practically as slow at everything as the old machine. Long story short, we finally found out that it was because of Bitlocker. Once it was turned off, the computer performed as expected.

Because this was during COVID and I was a thousand miles away, I didn’t actually do the job; a computer guy she knew discovered and handled the problem.

So having been through this, I should have been on the lookout for Bitlocker when I got this new laptop in early 2021. I don’t recall seeing it mentioned in the startup procedures when I got the computer out of the box, but I’ve recently discovered that it is, in fact, active.

This machine’s performance is just fine, so it apparently isn’t having as much of an effect as it did on the All-In-One, but I’m still skeptical of Bitlocker, and I probably don’t really need it. And who knows how much faster this machine would be with it off?

What do you see as the pros and cons of Bitlocker?

And what do you think I should do: leave well enough alone, or disable/remove Bitlocker? If the latter, do you have any experience doing it? Presumably if I do a proper backup, I won’t lose any data, but are there risks? Could I brick the machine?

Thanks.

2

With an SSD, BitLocker should have no perceptible effect on performance. The only real downside is if you do not have access to the recovery key and also have no external/offsite backup.

3

My work computer has Bitlocker. I haven’t noticed any problems with performance, although to be fair I’ve never run it without Bitlocker. Since I use it every working day, I’m not going to forget the password. (You could store that in an encrypted folder on another computer, if you really want to.)

Bitlocker is pretty decent commercially available encryption software. If the police need your files they can get them, but it should deter a lot of potential hackers or other thieves.

4

If you are using a Microsoft account to login, you can backup your Bitlocker key to your account for future use.

5

How do I find the recovery key? I don’t login with my MS account, and the only security I have on login is the 4-digit PIN.

I do maintain good backups.

6

From start just type Bitlocker and you will be able to backup the key or print it.

7

Thanks, all.

Does anyone have experience disabling or removing Bitlocker? Easy? Nightmare?

8

From the same window where you can backup your key, just click on Turn off Bitlocker. It will transparently decrypt everything and you are done.

9

Have you done it yourself without any problems?

10

I’ve done it several hundred times. Turning it off causes no issues.

11

Many, many times.

12

Microsoft has provided a backdoor into Bitlocker protected data for law enforcement? Not too sure about that…

If it were me and I cared about protecting my data, I would leave encryption/Bitlocker enabled. That should be the default for all devices these days.