Treading similar ground to higher profile tools such as Steganos Safe, PrivateDisk is an application that creates a secure drive space on your computer and allows you to lock your data away from prying eyes.

For while effectively creating a virtual drive, it protects this drive with an AES-standard encryption password. Its focus is fairly tight: there are no added frills here, with the intent being to provide solid protection and little else. And for those looking for a simple way of protecting their files, PrivateDisk certainly has obvious merits, not least the complete lack of fuss to it all.

But, for us, it didn't quite go to plan.

After installation, the first problem we hit that was we couldn't get the program to run on our Vista-laden testbed laptop. It installed okay, but when we tried to execute the program proper, no dice. It turned out that a hidden administrator permissions window was at fault, so it seemed the problem had been averted. We'll chalk that one down to Vista.

But, as The Carpenters so wisely lamented, it's only just begun. Once we installed the program, we shut down our laptop, intending to come back and finalise the review later.

A bad plan.

Because what happened next was that Vista, in its wisdom, wouldn't boot. It turned out that the error was a fairly common one, and donning our best Sherlock Holmes outfit we traced the problem back to the installation of PrivateDisk. It took a full reformat of our test machine to get it back to normal, and while we suspect that Vista was the key culprit, it certainly kept us away from PrivateDisk for a couple of days while we sorted it all out.

Our second attempt to get the program going was more successful, and it all ran with no problems at all. We have to suspect we were just unlucky first time round. And once we'd finally got the program running, the benefits of the application started to become apparent.

For while PrivateDisk doesn't have the depth of protection you'd get from a higher profile alternative, it's a swift and effective piece of software. What's very much in its favour is how quickly you can get things done. Setting up a virtual drive and assigning a letter to it is a comparably quick process, and it's just a couple of buttons then to hide it away, replete with any material you've copied over to it.

There aren't too many more options on top of that (although it does offer a restricted list of applications you can alter that are allowed to access protected data), although we liked the inclusion of an attempted password recovery feature if you forget the word you've assigned to guard your virtual drive. But we'd have liked at least the option of a USB key unlock, rather than solely relying on password protection.

Yet take PrivateDisk as a provider of quick, easy security and you're unlikely to be too disappointed. It does things quickly, is simple to work with and delivers results. It leaves frills and features on the side, but still does enough to at least make it worth investigating the trial version. Even if we'd be doubly careful if Vista was part of the mix anywhere.

A tool that eventually proved to be a useful security option to have, even if it is simpler (in most senses) than the competition.