Carrying your notebook around increases the possibility of it getting lost. How much the possibility increases depends on how careful a person you are. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you lost your notebook? Don’t even think about the financial cost of replacing the notebook. What about all that data?
First of all, you really should have the discipline to backup your documents if you do not already do so –Think I’ll cover that in another article. The next thing to do will be to encrypt your data so even if your notebook gets into the hands of another person, they will have no access to that data.
I highly recommend FreeOTFE for this purpose. I have been using it for a while now and its extremely stable. Think the resource footprint is also quite small as you won’t even remember you have it running until you shutdown your notebook and you’re reminded by FreeOTFE to dismount all secure volumes before shutdown.