PGP Desktop 9.5
So PGP Desktop 9.5 was finally released. Some eagerly awaited features have finally been added, such as the expanding virtual disks and partion based whole disk encryption. This would allow me to have a single package for e-mail, file and disk encryption on my laptop which would be great as my reiserfs partitions have been a show stopper before. To bad I have one of those Sony Vaios that you have to dissasemble to atoms for changing the harddrive. Uninstalling my current disk encryption software in order to find out that the new one is not what I expected is also out of the question. So could anyone try it out and tell me if it’s worth the hassle? 
It would also be interesting to know if the interoperability with NOD32 has been adressed as the two software packages have had some problems before, at least if you installed NOD32 after you installed PGP 9. The packages install their own Layered Socket Providers (LSP) which evidently conflict with each other as svchost.exe and a bunch of other processes start crashing after the post installation reboot. The only solution I found to the problem was to remove the PGP LSP with the consequences of loosing the automatic outgoing encryption. I used LSP-fix to remove my PGP LSPs but would only recommend this solution to someone that knows what he’s doing.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:44 am
Wow, this is a pricey piece of software. What are the benefits of going with this as opposed to something like gpg4win and TrueCrypt, all of which are free and in some cases, open-source?
October 24th, 2006 at 10:39 am
In my personal opinion, the big difference is the integration into Windows and Outlook. I like the seamless policy based e-mail integration, that allows you to trigger encryption based on keywords, recipients and other outlook specific information. The support for self-extracting files has also proven to be useful. The PGP virtual disks are smooth to work with, and finally now if it does partition based encryption it can replace my other software. So I guess if your looking for a file encryption package and not any of the above additional functionality there are plenty of options. You could most likely also combine multiple free packages to obtain the same functionality.
As for the Truecrypt package it did not allow me to encrypt my XP system/boot partition, which is the reason I went with another commercial package. The Free CompuSec package from http://www.ce-infosys.com.sg/ should be able to do just that though and might also be a suitable replacement. I had some trouble running it in my vmware environment though.