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@Jo assuming they've got the laptop this actually makes sense

if a computer's turned off everything can be fully encrypted and if it's done properly you're not getting anything

if the computer's running when you get to it at least some of it has to be unencrypted and in RAM, hopefully including the bits you want

also a lot of disk encryption implementations only ask for a password on boot, so if you keep it running you don't have to deal with that