Originally Posted by
youranut
Or better yet I need to learn how to keep a travel laptop "clean". Keep in in a state ready for theft. Is there a how-to somewhere for this?
Windows 10 (and 8/8.1, but don't use them) has a "reset" function that wipes everything except the OS. You'd just need to reinstall your bare-minimum applications.
Other than that -- no how-to that I'm aware of, and with the need for security updates and laptops making it harder to swap drives it's a lot harder than it used to be. The absolute safest case would be to have a laptop with no regular HDD-installed OS at all -- just run it using a LiveCD (or LiveUSB, or a LiveCD image installed read-only onto the hard drive.) OTOH, you'd have to update that image fairly frequently.
I used to recommend just having a travel drive and a home-use drive, and swapping them (you'd need to run your security updates when you swapped the travel drive back in), and for machines where the drive is physically accessible, you can just do that still.
For that matter, if theft is the concern, isn't full-disk encryption good enough?