Laptop/portable - setting a password will stop the casual thief from taking
your data.

That's great.  That means only the stuff important to you (and whatever you
save from others that is important to them, but that they share with you)
will be on it. (Yes - that is a bit sarcastic. heh)

What is the 'password protection' that Toshiba Provides?  Where do you enter
this password, etc?

<corrected strange formatting on above paragraph>

You seem to have had some misguidance of why one uses logon passwords.  It
has nothing to do with whether you are the only user or not, but more to do
with protecting your data at some level.  You may be the only user now, but
when you leave your laptop unattended and someone can use it or if someone
breaks into your home to burgalize it - why not make it at least a little
harder for them to take your information?

In what way have you 'protected' the files you say are protected?  Zipped
them into folders with passwords on the Zip files or some sort of file
encryption?

You are not going to mess up anything if you put a password on your account
*unless* you forget the password.  People seem to avoid putting in a
password because of this most of the time.  What they seem to miss is they
can use whatever they want as a password in Windows (practically.)  For
example - although not the best password - you could make your password:

I posted a question on the Microsoft Newsgroups about passwords

You could make it something that makes sense to you, like:

I was born on October 12, 1964

Yes - those passwords *would work*.  Spaces, commas and all.  (Passwords
*are* case sensitive - so for many people it is easier to not use proper
punctuation in the password.)

My standard spiel on passwords:

Understanding what a good password might be is vital to your
personal and system security.  You may think you do not need to password
your home computer, as you may have it in a locked area (your home) where
no one else has access to it.  Remember, however, you aren't always
"in that locked area" when using your computer online - meaning you likely
have usernames and passwords associated with web sites and the likes that
you would prefer other people do not discover/use.  This is why you should
understand and utilize good passwords.

Good passwords are those that meet these general rules
(mileage may vary):

Passwords should contain at least six characters, and the character
string should contain at least three of these four character types:
   - uppercase letters
   - lowercase letters
   - numerals
   - nonalphanumeric characters (e.g., *, %, &, !, :)

Passwords should not contain your name/username.
Passwords should be unique to you and easy to remember.

One method many people are using today is to make up a phrase that
describes a point in their life and then turning that phrase into their
password by using only certain letters out of each word in that phrase.
It's much better than using your birthday month/year or your anniversary
in a pure sense.  For example, let's say my phrase is:
'Great Thanksgiving in 2007!'
I could come up with this password from that:
'Gr8Thanksgiving2007!'

I highly recommend you periodically change your passwords.
The suggested time varies, but I will throw out a 'once in every
3 to 6 months for every account you have.'

Also - many people complain that they just cannot remember the passwords
for all the sites they have - so they choose one password and use it for
everything.  Not a good idea.  A much better method would be to use a
Password Management tool - so you only have to remember one password,
but it opens an application that stores your username/passwords for
everything else - plus other valuable information.  One that I can
recommend:

KeePass Password Safe
http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

It can even generate passwords for you.

You should know - however - that if someone wants your data, they will get
it.  Encrypting helps ( a lot ) - but can be difficult to understand for a
casual user.

I would always recommend using a password (as well as setting a strong
password on the built-in Administrator account), but note that this won't
protect your data very thoroughly. Anyone can figure out how to reset a
Windows password if they do a few minutes of research. What you may want is
file encryption (EFS).