Password program

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Is there any free programs that you can download, that can put passwords on specific folders or programs? I need it to keep my siblings from playing some games and stuff...

 

You can do this with Winzip

 

stuff

You can set a password on Winzip but that's easily crackable with a dictionary attack, so make sure you use a password that cannot be found in a standard password-list.

 

Any other programs? (using winRAR right now...)

And exactly how do you put a password in winZIP? Is there an option in the menu that you can use on the thing you want to "encrypt" (not sure of the exact meaning of that word...), or do you have to first compress the file to winZIP format?

 

What OS are you using? If using Windows 2000 or XP, you could just make sure that your siblings don't have administrative privs and thus they wouldn't have access to any profile but their own.

Also, if WinRAR doesn't provide a password option and you're using Windows XP, you can use Compressed Folders to create a zip file and password protect it.

 

I'm not sure...but there used to be a program that didn't requite zipping the file/folder first. You basicly tell it what files/folders you want to password protect, and that's what it does. If you try and open the file/folder, a dialog box pops up asking for a password, if you type it in wrong, you can't access, delete, or move it. It also told you what user was trying to access it (if you have more than one user account on the computer).

I wish I could remember the name of the program...
Sorry.

 

I think the simplest is to go with Shalladeth's suggestions. Make yourself the administrator and set them up with their own profiles and set in those profiles what programs, files, etc they can and can't access.

To use the compressed file feature mentione above, visit this link:
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,110663,00.asp

If you mean to protect word documents and excel documents, the password protection is built into the software, not the operating system. I think Office 97 was the earliest Microsoft product to offer this. When you have the document open click tools->options, click the security tab. In office XP (probably 200 as well but I don't know about the others), you can set a separate password for opening and for modifying (so one person could read but not change and another can make changes too).

I just did a quick search and found some software.
http://www.folder-password-expert.com/index.html

http://www.winability.com/folderguard/

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1045491347/1

I've surfed a lot of the different tech related forums, FolderGuard seems to be the one most people have tried and seem to be happy with. I've never tried any of these, so I'd caution that these would all be tried at your own risk.

 

PGP 8 (Pretty Good Protection) I use that program myself. Awesome and very simple to use but hard to crack. Also has many other security functions such as email encryption, drive encryption...

 

Be extremely careful. I used the private folders function in XP and when Windows screwed up my profile, I wasn't able to recover my files. I eventually got them, but kill me if I know how I did that (i.e. which of the things I did finally worked).

I also used a certain program from a cover CD back in the times of Windows 98 and it suddenly refused to accept my password anymore. I had to break into it from the DOS level and - big surprise - it took me like five minutes to do that.