How can a password protect a folder on Windows? (Vista)

Is the only way I can password protect something is by making an uncompressed passworded zip folder?

 

There are some encryption schemes available. Resco Explorer, for example.

 

The best way to keep people out would be encrypting it, not just putting a password on it.

I recommend truecrypt, its freeware.
What it does is you create a file, call it w/e you want (name.whatever). When you want to access this, you open truecrypt, select that file, and type in the password, and it mounts it as a harddrive partition.
you can make this even more effective by renaming the file to something like... music.mp3. It will look like a winamp file, but will not play in winamp.

Another option, if you need alot of space, is to encrypt an entire secondary harddrive (with truecrypt). Anyone who tries to put this harddrive into their computer will think its just an unformatted drive, when in fact it has all your important data on it.

Hope that helps.... Maybe I'll write up A guide for this later

~Itomix

 

Looks like I'll tinker around with truecrypt.