Crypditor for Windows

It looks simple, but this app securely stores text files in an encrypted, password-protected form.

Crypteditor is essentially a text editor, like Notepad, but with extra security features built into it. As a text editor, it offers a very simple interface: a pane to which you can add tabs for new documents. This free app performed well in our tests, prompting us for a password each time we saved and closed and opened a file. Because this is a text editor, it's more suitable for saving essential information rather than documents requiring any sort of formatting. For this reason, the developers recommend Crypteditor for saving passwords, serial numbers, and other info that should be stored securely.

Saving private identifiers with a password-protected, encrypted document makes sense. However, a problem with this concept that we see is remembering or saving the password to the encrypted file. If you lose or forget that files password, you'll lose access to the rest of your secured info.

An interesting feature of Crypteditor is that it stores the protected files within the application itself, instead of to a separate folder or directory on your hard drive. Again, if the app gets deleted, your protected files and their info are lost as well.

These two caveats are our only concerns with this app. It functioned quickly and with no glitches in our tests. If you use it on a PC to which no others have access, securing the app and its info may not be a problem. But users who share a machine may have to worry about someone else inadvertently removing the app.

Version 1.21 build 1.153b adds Windows Vista compatibility.