How Much Does Truecrypt Slow Down a Netbook?
 

I'm getting a new netbook, and I know they are CPU and RAM challenged.

Anyone have any sense how much using Truecrypt slows things down? The two possibilities are having the whole drive encrypted for boot up, or allowing boot up without Truecrypt and creating an encrytped volume.

In my experience not that much. I would just have an encrypted volume, and not encrypt the entire drive.

Is that because you assume an encrypted entire drive would be slower?

I kind of like the idea of no unencrypted cache, which Truecrypt would provide.

Once mounted , I can´t say I´ve noticed any slow down in speed at all , using True Crypt on my notebook. The notebook partitioned into two drives: the second one , containing my personal stuff ,is encrypted with True Crypt.
That said, it really pays to be picky about what programs and services you run on a notebook if you wan´t to avoid any slow downs in speed.

I have a truecrypt partition that I run on a Acer 1810T with a dual core SU7300 processor - never even thought of the impact until I saw your question. from my perspective, it's a non-issue with what I'm running.