Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.
Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you've got an unactivated copy, local account, or don't know your M$ account credentials, your boned.
Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.
BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.
If my Chromebook could run Linux or even pure Android, I'd probably use it way more often. But it being a locked down distro with android bolted on is useless to me.
It feels like the worst of both worlds. It's fine for people who use a laptop/OS as a bootloader to a web browser, its not fine for weirdos like me.
Funny thing is that a cheap netbook has stats that would be fine for anything we did in the 90's maybe even some games too
The Chromebook I have, is overall fine. It runs ChromeOS pretty well, and most web pages don't make me beg for more RAM or CPU. ChromeOS does a fine job, to the point I wonder if I ran Arch or something on it, it's a crapshoot.
I think most laptops these days, even the cheap ones, are probably fine when you run a light OS on em. I've used computers that were 10 years old and ran most things decently well.
I've got an entry level desktop from 2009 I'm gonna throw arch on and run some stuff