Recently, I had a serious hardware issue with my laptop and DELL had to replace the LCD screen and the motherboard. Don't I have a brand new laptop now? Yes, for most part, but my harddisk drive and the cage is still old :-).

Ever since they replaced the hardware I've been having trouble with "BitLocker" - the technology which helps to encrypt the whole hard drive. The moment I try to turn on the bitlocker, it pops with an error message - "Wizard initialization has failed - You must take ownership of the trusted platform module (TPM)"

Initially I thought it was an issue as TPM wasn't turned-on in BIOS on the new motherboard, but even after that the issue still remained. After some significant research on the Internet and TPM documentation, I was able to fix the issue as the ownership on the TPM chip had to be created again as follows:

Set ownership of the TPM:

The TPM must also be owned before it can be used to help secure your computer. By setting ownership of the TPM, you are assigning a password that helps ensure only the authorized TPM owner can access and manage the TPM. The TPM password is also used to turn off the TPM if you no longer want to use it, or to clear the TPM if the computer is to be recycled. The following procedure steps you through the process of setting ownership of the TPM using the TPM Initialization Wizard.

1. At the command prompt type "tpm.msc"
2. 
3. 
4. On the Create the TPM owner password page, click Automatically create the password (recommended).
5. In the Save your TPM owner password dialog box, click Save the password.
6. In the Save As dialog box, select a location to save the password, and then click Save. The password file is saved as <ComputerName>.tpm.

   I highly recommend saving the TPM owner password to removable media.

7. Click Print the password if you want to print a hard copy of your password.

   I highly recommend printing a hard copy of your TPM owner password and storing it in a safe location.

8. Click Initialize. The process of initializing the TPM might take a few minutes to complete.
9. Click Close.
10. 
11. After this, I was able to successfully turn-on bitlocker

Hope this helps someone out there with a similar issue.

Google's two year handwork to come up with a browser is finally here . I just thought of running a comparison of it with IE8 and here's what I think after spending almost a whole day comparing the features;

What I like (many features which are also found in IE8):

1. Clean user interface
2. Home screen with most visited sites shown as thumbnails
3. Tear-off tabs (this is cool!) on separate process

Incognito browsing (equivalent to InPrivate browsing in IE8)

1. Domain highlighting (like IE8)
2. Smart URL bar (fast search directly from the URL bar + auto suggest)
3. Built in Google gears
4. DNS pre-fetching
5. Browser task manager

What I don't like:

1. No home button by default (can be enabled)
2. No tab grouping or coloring (like IE8)
3. No way to reopen incidentally closed tabs (which is a great IE8 feature)
4. No built-in phishing filter?
5. No thumbnail overview of open tabs (like IE7/8)
6. No ways to customize the browser (adding buttons etc.)
7. No indication whatsoever that a pop-up has been blocked (may be a beta issue)
8. Chrome seems a bit slower than IE8 (which is lightning FAST)