Microsoft Private Folder

I realize that I am posting two technology post's in one week, but I have fallen behind on my blogging lately due to training.  I locked myself in my office over the weekend and took my e-Pro courses and finished them, my eyes are a bit strained from all the reading and testing but I really found the course interesting and managed to finish it and pass the final.  I'm also trying to finish my GRI by April so I've got training every week.

Anyways, here is one more techy topic:

Have any of you ever wished that you could find an easy to use tool that takes private data and encrypt's it so that prying eyes can't open them without knowing the password?  I use my laptop a lot and sometimes have sensitive information about people.  I carry my computer client's network passwords on my laptop because I can't remember them all and I always worry that my laptop will get stolen, or lost and now I've just exposed my clients to whoever now has my laptop.  I've paid for various encryption software that stores passwords and logins, but in the end I just get tired of dealing with them....and now I'm out another $50 bucks (or whatever the cost was).  You will find that I like free stuff, as I'm sure most everyone else does.

Microsoft actually made a passworded folder for us as part of XP, but the IT departments had a royal cow about giving this program to the corporate user and I can totally agree with them.  The danger of this Private Folder is that it's passworded and encrypted to the point that if you forget your password you are done, no way to ever get any of your files out of this folder....well,  maybe not for about 100 years of trying to crack the encryption on todays machines, and probably not even by then.

Now, with Microsoft's Private Folder you aren't stuck with a few formats to input data.  You can create any document with any application and place it in this folder, haven't found one that you couldn't put in there, but you never know (had to throw out that disclaimer ).  I have the folder sitting on my desktop and whenever I create a document I just save it to that folder rather than to My Documents.  The folder stays unlocked for whatever amount of time you set it to, which is a nice feature if you walk away and forget to lock the folder.

You want to know another reason why I like this program so much......It's Free!!!

You can download this program here...