WinXAR is a powerful security tool, designed to password-protect your personal information. It can encrypt, decrypt and shred files, in a very easy manner.

The GUI is user-friendly, similar to the one of Explorer. In matter of fact, you browse for files and folders just as you do in Explorer, while double-clicking a file initiates it.

All you have to do is select a file or folder, then encrypt it. The encryption parameters contain a password (that can be also set as default password for everything else).

Optionally, you can rename or test the encrypted file, and once encryption is complete you can choose to either keep, delete, or shred and delete the original file. This way, you have complete control over traces of data you leave behind.

Furthermore, if you don't want wandering eyes to watch you type and try to decode the password, you can press a button to bring up a virtual keyboard.

When you decrypt a file, you have the option of keeping the encrypted file once the job is done.

We have noticed that when you exit WinXAR and then initiate it again, the application remembers your last location.

Moreover, WinXAR has a Virtual Disk Driver. It allows you to mount an encrypted virtual disk image file/partition/disk to make it usable. But we were not able to make it work, unfortunately.

Our tests ran perfectly (encryption, decryption, and testing encrypted files), and the application was up to the challenge (it works really fast).

WinXAR uses a little amount of CPU and memory resources, and its help file is well put together.

Overall, WinXAR is definitely a strong competitor when it comes to encryption tools, and we suggest you give it a shot. 30 days of trial are more than enough for you to test it. Also, the full version price is quite low.