David Gillon

I left my laptop on last night when I went to cook tea and watch a couple of hours of TV with my sister, when I came back to it later it was dead.

Not just turned off, unwakeable, It's dead, Jim!

So I was more than a little stressed when I went to sleep.

I woke up at 6:30 this morning (hours earlier than usual) and thought, okay, let's have a look at it.

When I pressed the on button, the LED in the caps lock button lit (not convinced it did this last night). So I knew it was getting power, and after a couple of minutes I got the Dell logo - this is looking good!

Then I got a Blue Screen - Please enter your 48 Digit Bitlocker number.

What? What the hell! WTF is Bitlocker!?! (I may have known at one time, I certainly didn't know at 6:30 this morning).

So I grabbed my tablet to find out that Bitlocker is Windows 11's on-by-default disc encryption. Oh, FFS, Microsoft! I don't need on-by-default disc encryption, particularly if my system has half-died and my record of my Microsoft Account password I need to look up the 48 digit key is on the drive you won't let me into.

Fortunately I then noticed a Continue button off to the side on the bluescreen and it let me take it, which started Windows booting up.

As far as I can tell, I must have interrupted a Windows update last night, which threw up the Bitlocker thing out of spite.

After some poking around in settings, Bitlocker is turned off and theoretically busy decrypting my hard-drive - some kind of process bar would be nice - and I'll be updating my USB with key files backups later.