Every bit of information that you’ve entered into your computer in the past few months is probably recoverable by anyone who is able to get access to your system, unless you’ve been doing some pretty sophisticated security operations. If you know what those operations are, you don’t need to read any farther – your geekiness surpasses the subject of this article – but you might want to send it to someone you know.

Our subject, however, is not how to keep people from getting access to your PC. There’s plenty of information about that on the Web, and if you’re concerned (and you’re nuts if you’re not concerned) you can read all about it there. What we’re interested in is passwords.

While passwords do apply to computer security, there’s more to it than that, because every bit of information you’ve entered into a form online, every receipt that you’ve saved in a Web mail account, every tidbit you’ve provided to online service personnel – all of that is already someplace else, and mostly out of your control.

There’s a lot of fuss on the Web about the safety of Web mail accounts like Google, Hotmail, and the others. Perhaps that’s justified, perhaps it’s silly. Given all the other places where your personal information resides, it’s mostly silly. Let’s see: there’s the bank, the mortgage company, the car finance folks, the (shudder) VA and other repositories of medical info. There’s eBay, PayPal, TransUnion, Equifax, FICO, and the other credit agencies. There’s every place you’ve ever used a credit card (they probably don’t have your SSN, but everything else needed to wipe out that credit account is there). You don’t have any financial secrets, and probably very few other ones either. It’s all someplace accessible.

What you can do is try to make it as inaccessible as possible. That’s where passwords come in. Good passwords. If the bad guys hack the mortgage company they’ve got you cold, but that’s not the most likely way in for them. The most likely way is your carelessness in protecting your account. It’s not hard to steal your mail, or go through your trash to get leads, but if you’ve protected your critical online information with good passwords, they’ll find themselves at a dead end.

A word here about computers with XP. If you don’t have to password-protect individual accounts, the easiest way to safeguard your PC from attack over the Internet is simply to have no password at all. XP will not admit outsiders to an unprotected system. Once a password is used, however, it assumes that anyone with the password is cool, and just says “howdy.” Obviously, this leaves your computer vulnerable to anyone physically present, so you have to make some choices. However, if you’re going to use passwords, use good, strong ones because the boys and girls on the Net will crack weak ones in about a millisecond – literally. Equally obviously, if you’re using a Mac or running Linux, you probably aren’t all that concerned. In that case, why are you reading Windows Fanatics to begin with?

Having said all that, I’m not going to tell you anything about how to create strong passwords. I’ve written a couple of articles elsewhere, but then I discovered that Microsoft has done a better job. So here’s the link. The rest is up to you. Read the excellent article, create your passwords, check them in the Password Checker Microsoft provides, and then start accessing those accounts and getting them protected – finally.

As to what you do with all those passwords to keep them safe, I’m still letting others do the work. Fred Langa covered this issue in his Langalist Newsletter a year or so ago. His advice is still good. While you’re there, subscribe to the Langalist. It’s one of the best tech newsletters “for the rest of us” out there.