> 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 domai

> 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.