@Chumly,
Chumly you might wish to look at the following
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truecrypt
To give you an idea of what truecrypt is along with their own website
http://truecrypt.org
As a user of this program for a number of years I could not be happier with it and never had a problem with it working or performed of any kind. Hell in fact I had run if forrunner program scandisk on 98 systems also without problems for a number of years before truecrypt replaced it.
With it on your system your information should be safe from any reasonable level of attack short of someone with the resources of a government or a very large firm behind them and even there you would give them one hell of a headache.
Someone just randomly stealing your laptop at a airport would be stop cold by truecrypt unlike with an bios lock and an ATA lock that can be gotten around for at most 200 dollars.
If I was you I would still keep my bios and ATA lock in place in order to made what is call an evil maid attack a great deal harder.
An evil maid attack is someone that is targeting you knowing you are running truecrypt and had access to your computer long enough to boot up with a USB stick and place a keylogger in the MBR area of the hard drive to record your truecrypt passphase as you enter it and then they would need access once more to your computer.
That is also a highly directed attack and not an issue for most people.