A few days ago, someone mugged one of our tech writers outside her apartment building.

She had a laptop computer that was company property, and which contained among other things, an application the company licenses ... <yank> ... The BIOS password protection is garbage for protecting hard drive contents - the hard drives are unencrypted and can just be popped out and stuck into a different laptop of the same model.

Bear

An ancient and revered topic. If you start to pursue the paranoid trains of thought that haunt the subject you'll see that you probably shouldn't even have the key entered via the laptop's chipset if you really want the disk to be useless when removed. Which points to the need for a lump in the ribbon cable with a HW key + lengthy PIN. Mike