Today I thought to talk about this new feature of Windows 7. Even though I use the word “Windows 7″, it actually comes with Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate editions. So if you’re using or hoping to use Windows 7 Professenal, Home Preminum, Home Basic or Stater editions, you won’t find this feature. Â “Bit Locker to go” provide encrypting facility to your USB flash drives. It helps you to protect your sensitive data on USB flash drives from intruders. BitLocker to go enabled USB flash drives will work with XP sp3 and above systems. Okay, lets see how to enable “BitLocker to go” feature for your USB flash drive. It’s just a piece of cake, Just plug your USB flash drive.

Go to My Computer and right click on USB flash drive, select “Turn on BitLocker…”

Then you have option to choose how do you want to protect your drive. Â Use the option “Use a password to unlock the drive”, then type a strong password with combination of letters (Lowercase and Uppercase), numbers, symbols. Click Next.

Then you can save the recover key to a file or you can print your recover key . Click on “Save the recover key to a file”.

Choose location to save, then click Next.

Click on “Start Encrypting” to start encrypting the USB falsh drive. This will take some time depending on the capacity of your USB flash drive. After encrypting process has been finished it will show “Finished” message. Now you can see a change of USB flash drive icon, now it shows with a locker icon. so now your data on this drive is protected.

Unplug it from the system and plug it again, now it will prompt you to enter password. You have to give the password to access USB flash drive, to access files on it.