With the ever increasing popularity of Netbooks, more and more people are using laptops at work and at home. Yet, I find it disturbing how few people protect their laptops against lose of theft.

Just think for a moment, if you were to lose your laptop right now what information would be on there? Website log in details, facebook passwords, personal emails? What about your IM chat history and all those "downloads"? You get the picture. That's why it's important to encrypt your laptop.

It is not enough to just have a log in name and password, even a novice techy can remove the hard drive and look at the file contents via a HD caddy. To truly secure your data you need to encrypt the data. Encrypted data cannot be viewed without the secret pass-phrase.

So how do you encrypt your laptop? Well that all depends on your laptop's Operating System. The most popular OS is still Windows and for that TrueCrypt is the best option.

TrueCrypt is an open-source encryption tool that can secure data in many different ways, but one of its more impressive features is the ability to encrypt your entire Windows hard-drive. It will sit in the backing and work away at securing all you data. Once finished, every time you boot up you'll be asked for the secret pass-phrase, without this no-one can view the data contained within.

Unfortunately, TrueCrypt does not currently support full drive encryption on Mac or Linux systems. However, both of these come with their own solutions. Mac has FileVault and the Ubuntu distribution of Linux now comes with an install option to encypt users /home directory.

Whatever solution you use, it is essential to secure your data. With free and built in solutions now available on all platforms, there really isn't any excuse not to encrypt your laptop.