Win7 Pc Password Effectiveness

I recently installed Win7 on a new tabletop PC. Can anyone tell me how effective using the password is in preventing anyone from using the PC unless they know the password?

Thanks

 

If you have shared anything then other users can probably access it without the password. Otherwise it is effective against the average user - those who only know how to browse, email, skype and maybe use a few favourite softwares. But against those who know their way around computers it is almost totally ineffective unless you use encryption.

 

To add to Earthling's post...
There are free tools that can be run from a USB stick that can remove Windows 7's password. And it can take as little as 15 minutes.

 

Thanks to both earthling and Eldon for their replies. I suspected that Win7 password protection wasn't worth the trouble.

When I was running with XP I had a very good encryption program called TrueCrypt. With Win7 that program was discontinued. i think the developers took jobs with Microsoft. Anyway my only option appeared to be using Win7 encryption which seemed to me to be 1. Difficult to implement and 2. Easy to mess up and not be able to decrypt. I was able to easily encrypt a directory to and put files in it that would decrpyt on the fly when accessing them.

Do you know of any independent encryption programs that could serve as a replacement for TrueCrypt or is development and distribution of such programs now illegal?

 

Here you go.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/veracrypt.html

 

Eldon - Thank you so much! I used TrueCrypt for many, many years with great success. You can imagine my disappointment when Win7 told me I could no longer use it. This VeraCrypt sounds great! I'm downloading it as I key this reply.

 

I've been using Cryptainer free for donkey's years. Your encrypted drive only becomes visible in Explorer once logged into Cryptainer (strong password). Will also take a look at VeraCrypt.

 

I installed VeraCrypt and I'm now using it. The major thing (for me) is that VeraCrypt is "exactly" like True Crypt from a user point of view. So for me, no real learning curve. Happy, happy!

 

Back in 1996, when I was doing research for my series of three handbooks on code breaking it was generally thought (if memory serves) that a computer based brute force search for a password was realistically limited to passwords that were less than 7 characters and anything 8 characters or more would take an impractical long time. A few yearslater an outfit in Calf. was able to link up a number of computers (servers) and created a program to run on each that were able to divide the work so that each would brute force different segments of the possible password and achieve a result in a matter of days for a RSA encryption.

As I aged I loss track of efforts in this "brute force" approach and was of the opinion that the development of AES made a brute force attack essentially impossible.

Have developments created a situation where now a password of 20 or more characters is required to protect against a brute force attack?

If this post should be in a different thread, please move it.