Password Protecting Files On Win7?

[killergamer]

Is there a way to password protect a file on Win7? My family uses my laptop and I don't want them getting into my school documents! Ive thought about a encrypted file and looked into truecrypt but thats a little more than what I need. SO PLEASE IS THERE A WAY??

+Rep to the helpers!

[slaveofconvention]

The easiest thing to do would probably be to password protect your whole account and create a second user account for everyone else to use - then you wouldn't need to worry about specific files and folders because everything would be covered

[OvRiDe]

The password protected account sorta works. The problem is if both accounts are in the administrators group, they will have access to each others files. The main thing that would do is just put them "out of sight, out of mind". If they went looking for them, they could still access them, unless you go in and actually set the file permissions. You would need to remove file permissions from the Administrators group, and any other accounts on the box. It's doable, but can be a royal PIA if you don't set the permissions properly. If your using Word and Excel.. they both have internal functions to password protect documents. Also if you just want to encrypt/password protect single files, there is a program called Axcrypt (http://www.axantum.com/axcrypt/) that does a pretty good job, and doesn't require all the containers and such that Truecrypt does.

[farlo]

i'd just use truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org) and set up a mountable directory that is encrypted.

[Mark_Hardware]

Everything I can find either says to have a different user account, then modify the permissions on the folder under your own account. That actually works pretty well, apparently. Plus if other people use your computer, I don't see why you wouldn't want to have separate accounts....
Other than that, I keep coming up with Truecrypt, over and over.....

[ChRoNo16]

Why not create a whole new admin group, and make your account the only member? Im not exact on how to do it, but it is possible and definitely doable.