Wincrypt

With all the malicious types of content lurking in every corner of the information superhighway, and antivirus is not enough to keep your important files safe. On the other hand, adding them to an archive makes sure they can’t be infiltrated, but still not completely safe. Luckily, there are tons of applications out there like Wincrypt, which encrypt custom files with a password so only you can access them.

A neat things about the application is that you don’t have to go through a setup process to make it work, and can easily be used directly from a USB flash drive on other computers as well. With registries not being a dependency, you can rest assured that the target PC’s health status remains intact.

On the visual side of things, features are all presented in a compact main window, which poses no accommodation problems whatsoever. The two functions to encrypt and decrypt are triggered separately, but the general process is similar, requiring you to select the target file and provide the corresponding security code.

Unfortunately, the only way to select files is through the built-in browse dialogs, because dragging them over the main window has no effect, and there’s no integration in the system context menu for easy, and effortless trigger. For a bit more security, you can have a .plain extension added to decrypted files, so you manually writing down, creating general confusion for anyone attempting to get their hands on target files.

The application relies on the popular AES encryption algorithm to secure your files, with no other options to choose from. Before the file is encrypted, you also need to write down and confirm a password, but make sure nobody is watching, because characters are not masked, and there’s no option to do so, and the same goes for decrypting.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Wincrypt is a lightweight and easy to use utility which comes in handy for securing files on the go. Sure enough it can only use one encryption algorithm, and it feels a little rough around the edges overall, but in the end manages to add that extra layer of security over files of interest.