
If you couldn't encrypt yours.. that has nothing to do with the brand. It was most likely a dying/failing hard drive or something like that. Based on what you said in your OP, it was most likely hardware failing. Toshiba makes really good laptops. I have one from over 7 years ago still going strong, has taken tons of abuse. Lenovo is my first pick though, they have the highest quality. Any hardware can potentially fail before its time, doesn't matter who it's from.. but some do tend to use higher quality components. For laptop manufacturers Lenovo, Toshiba and Sony are my gotos in that order.
Truecrypt should work on any Hard Drive Disk or SSD. Brand has nothing to do with it, they all mostly use the same OEM for parts anyway. (with some exceptions).
If you want my recommendation, I would do two things: 1. Windows on the main drive, Truecrypt the entire drive, then go through some Black Viper Win 7 tweaks to make it a bit more secure. Get a decent free AV like Avast or manage to get Kasperkey or Nod32. Get firefox+noscript+adblock+ghostery. Get TOR. A few other tweaks and you are solid. If you are familiar with Windows already, that would be my recommendation. You can use Tor or whatever, but I would use that for your "main" OS.
2. Then you can install a version of Linux - Tails ( https://tails.boum.org/ ), put that on a USB drive, and boot to that whenever you want to do anything shady. All internet activity is forced through the TOR network, and when you log off/remove your USB key it leaves no traces on the system or key. You can set it to have "persistant" hard drive usage so you can store files, but that's a little less secure. Either way the Linux method is by default 5x more secure than Windows. And the Live version comes preinstalled with everything you need pretty much, drivers, video/photo editing, word processing, tor, etc.. all open source.
I'd recommend doing something like that, having Windows on your HDD.. and then putting a "Live" bootable version of Linux on a thumb drive or something. That way you can tinker around with Linux whenever you want. OR you could hard install Linux to the drive and do a Dual Boot configuration, but that would require formatting it properly first.
It's best to do it that way, if you don't want to leave a 'trail'. Have a fake OS, you can do that with Truecrypt too.
Linux is good to learn, especially if you have interest in security. So just get started and play around with it, that's the best way to learn. Can't go wrong with free.
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