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Various 
Heard a lot of buzzwords here at the IT-Forum. One off them is BitLocker a neat function within Microsoft Vista and in “Longhorn” as well. Bitlocker will encrypt all your data on your harddisk so it needs something to store your actual SRK (Storage Root Key) to be able to decrypt (and encrypt) the data. Well here com the hardware vendors to provide new notebooks (for instance) with TPM chips to store that key. You just fire up your brand new notebook running Vista and the neath Bitlocker uses the TPM chip to fetch the SRK and the data on yopur disk is no longer just a bunch of rubbish 😉
However I heard something that made me instantly nervous, sweaty and itchy. Bitlocker uses your BIOS hardware and settings to compose the private key. We have a lot of notebooks in our company, hell we’re IT guys remember! We need that stuff to work with like a carpenter needs his nails and hammer. Anyway I see notebooks having hardware related problems (for instance we have a guy capable of trashing Bluetooth modules by the number) reasonably often. And guess how this faulty hardware gets repaired . . . . . Yep, they just replace the motherboard.
Bommer.