In light of what has happened with the theft of the VA laptop, what are the "best practices" for securing laptops?

[Mike Foster <mike () mytechcoach com>]

In light of what has happened with the theft of the VA laptop, what are the "best practices" for securing laptops?  Am 
curious how all of you feel about the options.

How do  you feel and/or what is your experience with:
--Power-on passwords in the hardware/CMOS/BIOS Setup
--Hard drive locking passwords in the hardware/CMOS/BIOS Setup
--Laptops equipped with fingerprint readers for the above two options
--Windows NTFS EFS encryption
--TrueCrypt from www.truecrypt.org for encrypted storage areas
--Trusted Platform Module (TPM) https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org
--Tokens that plug into USB
--Others?

Thank you in advance...