It has been long overdue and now its finally present. Vista has something called the Secure Startup Volume Encryption which will work on computers with the Trusted Module Platform (TPM) chip. Here, all except the bare minimum of the boot volume is encrypted and at boot time the TPM transparently allows access to the drive. If someone either removed the hard disk and puts it in a different machine or attempts to boot from a different OS, the disk will be unreadable without a password. There is no GUI for this in Beta 1 but the service is there.