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I am precisely typing this from an store-bought HP Elite laptop from 2017 (!) and it definitely came with Bitlocker enabled. In fact, HP explicitly says that al

I am precisely typing this from an store-bought HP Elite laptop from 2017 (!) and it definitely came with Bitlocker enabled. In fact, HP explicitly says that all their laptops with modern standby (which again is most of them, and explicitly the Elitebook 840) come with Bitlocker on !! https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06458046 https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06458046 You could have said Acer or some other lesser-known brand and I would have not been able to counter, but HP? Are you sure "work" didn't configure Bitlocker to be disabled ?

vladvasiliu 4y ago
> Are you sure "work" didn't configure Bitlocker to be disabled ? Absolutely. I took the PC out of the box myself ("I am work") and I know we don't have our supplier do anything to the PCs before they send them to us, because we remaster them first thing. My PC didn't go through that process because it's not one of the models everyone else uses and I don't use Windows. --- edit: there's talk on a page referenced by your link about "Device Encryption" (as opposed to Drive encryption) which is activated when the PC is joined to a domain. This did actually happen, but out of the box the drive was not encrypted. The reason I know is because I went to enable regular Bitlocker but then stopped because I didn't have a separate drive on hand to save the recovery key.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > there's talk on a page referenced by your link about "Device Encryption" (as opposed to Drive encryption) which is activated when the PC is joined to a domain. Device encryption, disk encryption, and Bitlocker are actually the same thing. The reason is that Windows Home doesn't have "Bitlocker" which means it can't do external (aka non-boot) disk encryption, so they call the resulting feature "Device encryption", but it's still Bitlocker. My only guess is that you didn't login with a Microsoft account, since it is a requirement and "you don't use Windows". But obviously, the majority of people do login with a Microsoft account, and judging from HP's own support page plus the amount of people I can google claiming to have lost their recovery keys on the same laptop model you have ... I'm quite sure it is enabled by default.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    > My only guess is that you didn't login with a Microsoft account That's correct, I created a local-only account since the PC wasn't connected to any network. However, I would have expected a feature "enabled by default" to not be tied to a specific type of account. I suppose that it would have to save the key somewhere, which works less well with local accounts.
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      MS accounts are mandatory for all home editions of Windows, and likely soon to be for everything that's not an enterprise edition.

vladvasiliu 4y ago

> Are you sure "work" didn't configure Bitlocker to be disabled ? Absolutely. I took the PC out of the box myself ("I am work") and I know we don't have our supplier do anything to the PCs before they send them to us, because we remaster them first thing. My PC didn't go through that process because it's not one of the models everyone else uses and I don't use Windows. --- edit: there's talk on a page referenced by your link about "Device Encryption" (as opposed to Drive encryption) which is activated when the PC is joined to a domain. This did actually happen, but out of the box the drive was not encrypted. The reason I know is because I went to enable regular Bitlocker but then stopped because I didn't have a separate drive on hand to save the recovery key.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> there's talk on a page referenced by your link about "Device Encryption" (as opposed to Drive encryption) which is activated when the PC is joined to a domain. Device encryption, disk encryption, and Bitlocker are actually the same thing. The reason is that Windows Home doesn't have "Bitlocker" which means it can't do external (aka non-boot) disk encryption, so they call the resulting feature "Device encryption", but it's still Bitlocker. My only guess is that you didn't login with a Microsoft account, since it is a requirement and "you don't use Windows". But obviously, the majority of people do login with a Microsoft account, and judging from HP's own support page plus the amount of people I can google claiming to have lost their recovery keys on the same laptop model you have ... I'm quite sure it is enabled by default.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  > My only guess is that you didn't login with a Microsoft account That's correct, I created a local-only account since the PC wasn't connected to any network. However, I would have expected a feature "enabled by default" to not be tied to a specific type of account. I suppose that it would have to save the key somewhere, which works less well with local accounts.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    MS accounts are mandatory for all home editions of Windows, and likely soon to be for everything that's not an enterprise edition.