can we? any files that what i mean later

Yes. I use a program called Cryptext. It allows you to encrypt a file so no one can open it without the password. All you do is right-click on it, choose "encrypt", put in your password, and that's it. To decrypt you do the same thing, except you choose "decrypt", and you are able to open the file again. I've tried a number of these, and Cryptext is the easiest I've seen, and it's totally free. You can download it at zdnet.com/downloads and then just type in the name, and it should bring you to the link where you can download it. It's also small and powerful. Hope this helps.

Another program and a good one is called PGP. It is also free. Go to Pretty Good Protection International. wcr3d

G'day Tony, I found a sort of unorthodox way to protect files. Example, suppose you have a bitmap file you do not wish any one to open, all I did was open the .bmp file in Wordpad and removed the first 2 chars that say BM [for bitmap], this is the header of a file I believe and will stop it being opened by Mspaint or any other image program, I also changed the extension as well but I put the BM at the start of the file name to remind me, no one would even consider my fiendishly clever plan as they would think it is just a text file or something, a hassle I know but that's what I do now. Of course some 10 year old could get lucky I suppose.

I think all what you've done is change the format of the image file. So no paint program could recognize it. Actually, this is a clever way to get files corrupted and you are the only one can restore them back. Pretty helpful for spies, no need to encrypt stuffs and then some other agents decrypt it. Just get the file corrupted and memorize the part you took off :)

G'day Tamouh, what gave me the idea was that on a Cd I've got about the Louvre Museum it has all the image files with the .bmp extension but nothing will open them but when I view them in Wordpad the first 2 chars say XW but Windows Bitmaps have the BM header so I get the message that it is not a valid bitmap. I changed one to BM but paint would say there was not enough memory to open it. I think it could be in X-Windows [XW] image format, what ever that is. I've been trying to open them for 3 years now. .exe and .dll files have the MZ header [I think it's the header] so I guess without that nothing will recognise the file to open it and this is where I got this devilishly cleaver idea from.