Netbooks are likely to be a popular gift this holiday season—they're cheap, highly portable, and the kind of thing that you can give as a gift to a relatively novice computer user who needs a laptop but doesn't need the power or responsibility that comes with a more expensive portable. Netbooks are also looking increasingly good to business travelers, due to their portability and low hardware replacement cost in case of loss, damage, or theft. But even though a netbook itself can be cheap to replace, losing an inexpensive netbook PC can still be very costly. Sure, a stolen or lost netbook will set you back a few hundred dollars for the device, but you have to consider how much the data stored on it is worth. That lost netbook can open you up to identity theft, empty out your bank accounts, or even cost you your job. That's something to think about before you walk out the door with that $300 wonder.

However, with a little bit of planning, a little bit of effort, and perhaps some additional software, you can ensure that if you lose your netbook, whoever finds it has nothing more than a useless, two-pound hunk of plastic and silicon. Not only can you protect and encrypt your data from prying eyes, you can also set your netbook to self-destruct all the data onboard if you lose it.

In this article, we'll give you a basic introduction to securing your Windows netbook in case it's stolen. Advanced Windows users will already know most of what we'll cover, so this article is aimed more at the user who has a new netbook and no idea how to secure it.

The basics

The first, perhaps most obvious step to protecting your data lies in making sure that your user account is password-protected. Both Windows XP and Windows 7 can create user accounts and add passwords quite easily, although both have a slightly different process for doing so. It seems that when most people set up their netbooks, they go along with the default settings and skip creating a user account. Creating a user account and password is a critical first step to protecting your netbook—that information is usually a prerequisite for more advanced security products. Just remember, user accounts and passwords are only a first step towards securing your data and can sometimes be bypassed if not configured properly.

Adding an account and password on a Windows XP machine is a straightforward process, and that process is quite similar on other version of Windows (Including Vista and Windows 7).

First, you will need to launch the control panel application to access the User Accounts application:

From Control Panel, you choose the User Accounts application. Here you can check and see that you have a user account set up and you can make sure that no other accounts are enabled or configured. If there are other accounts, it is critical to make sure that they all have passwords:

To create a password for an existing account, you click on the change account icon, which launches the account maintenance application; from there you can create a password for the account:

When you create your password, make sure it is at least 8 characters and contains letters, numbers and even some special characters:

If you have the option to 'make your files private', do so for an extra layer of security on your netbook: