Any techie geek here ??

The encryption only kicks in and becomes effective only when the TPM is unavailable OR the person trying to access the information doesn't p the correct credentials that contain the encryption key. So say hypothetically you lose your laptop and or it gets stolen I wouldn't be able to take my handy external USB IDE / SATA hard drive hard drive reader and look at any files on your system. Now I would from my understanding be able to wipe the hard drive and reload everything on it but I wouldn't be able to recover any of your files.