okay people i had a member ask earlyer how to lock folder and or a file and i had the answer, and i though to my self after i had written it maybe everyone may need to do thsi so ill post it into a tutorial, okay so i wrote this for someoneelse earlyer and am posting it here for all to see:

you dont need software to lock a folder or add a password to a folder right okay this is my little tutorial on how to lock a folder, here we go first things first you need a random folder or the folder you wish to lcok then put what ever you want to lock into the folder, then right click on the folder and click send to>compressed (zipped) folder, ok then when you have your zipped folder hide or delete the old folder as it is the zipped folder that you need to lock it, okay then double clikc on your zipped folder and it will open up then, click file then you will see extract all files then under that you will see add password then clikc that and then a dialouge box will open up and ask you for a pass word entre your password and then clcik ok,

now the folder is locked ok now just test that it works clcik your way througha dn try to open teh file you have, then it should bring up another dialouge box asking you to enter your password enter the password and oyu can see the file you locked, wiht this method you have the ability to lock thousands on files all with the same password, the only problem is that when its locked it is locked and theres not a way top get around the locking process so i recomend that you have a backup of the files you have locked, so there you have it you can now lock and unlock files, thanks for reading and i hope that this has helped, so what are you trying to lock anyways why dont you want anyone to get to thsi secret file? anyways hope this has helped!

really hope this has helped some people and i hope it was easy to follow and good luck with locking you files and folders, as i siad earlyer please remeber to keep a backup of the files so that you dont lose your work, good luck and have fun with it,

cant you hide the folder and add a password?

if you really want to hide something, you should also get a file/harddrive encryptor. there are many free ones out there that allow you to scramble the data the way you want to.

yeah you could do that but to keep the data even more secret what you could do is the above and then left clikc on it and then select hidden and the way the folder is shown, thats one way to do it but like you say you would be best to get a free encryption soft ware liek you say there are millions as a matter of fact i ahev a few on my pc, these rock and can work very well although it will never be impossible for people to hide files totally as there are hundreds of ways to get the data back, although the best way to eliminate any one gettign any of you data is to get a big baseball bat and smash the hell out of you hard drive then it would be near impossible to retreive the data, although i say near impossible because i suppose oen very clever person may be able to get it back, but there we go im starting to drabble on and its late so i gotta go to bed now see ya later guys and have fun with hiding all you files and password protectign them,

i think one programs do that
i think thats name is lock folder , 2 years ago i download it form www.download.com website . but its not free software .
this software allow to you put password on folders . when you want to view folder you must enter password .

I thi nk that one of the things he mentioned in his tutorial was that this was the free way of doing it. I also wanted to mention that making the file hidden on top of passwording it is definately a good idea. My computer is passworded but I have it set up so that it will login on its own after a few seconds. My personal files are not passworded but you would have to have the password to get to any of the system files. So if anyone was to try to mess up my system they would have to get my password first.

Oooo, this is an interesting thing, I've never thought that it was possible to lock folders and files on a computer. This will be very helpful if it works, I'm going to go try it now. lol, thanks for this. Hopefully I won't mess up and will get it right.

Its not really locking it, its compressing all the files in that folder into one file, then being able to unzip it all when u need it, or unzip individual files and use them. u cant use this for an executable file that relies on one or more other files int aht same folder cuz theyd be compressed when u tried to load the exe

also, just another suggestion, before trying this on any major files that may be on you computer, you should make a file and name it anything and put a bunch of blank documents or somthing in there, and THEN try this process of locking the folders on that foler befoe you try it on an important file because lord knows there is no way of reteiving the lost password if it doesn't work as well as you want it...

that is another thing to keep in mind, you cannot retreive the password if you ever loose it

Any way to do it that doesn't involve compression?