As for encryption products, there are dozens and dozens to choose from. My advice is to select a vendor that has stood the test of time and has undergone third-party and expert review.

Here are my suggestions for some good products to review. (To figure out which products to avoid, you can't go wrong by querying any Internet search engine with the words "Bruce Schneier dog house." Bruce, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, routinely points out questionable crypto products in his Crypto-Gram newsletter.)

Phil Zimmerman's PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) product is still around in both free and commercial forms. GnuPG is an excellent product that supports Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac, and Risc platforms. Make sure you get latest Version 1.4.2.2, patched to close the vulnerability reported in early March.

The International PGP Home Page has free versions of PGP for more than 12 different OSes, including Atari, Palm, and EPOC. If you need commercial suppo rt, PGP Corp. provides products for Windows, Mac, and BlackBerrys. The OpenPGP Alliance is another good resource for other PGP products and links.

Apple's OS X comes with FileVault, which uses 128-bit AES symmetric encryption. It protects files in user's home directories, and it allows a master key to be set computerwide in case the original user cannot log on to recover the files.