[entwisi]

Your password offers zero protection against a hacker, if I needed to I'd just pull the disk and shove it in a usb caddy, all data now easily available. As for microsoft knowing their own defects better than anyone else I'm really sorry but that is utter twaddle. They are constantly being tod by the security companies of major bugs in their system that they then try and rush a fix out, in fact they sometimes dont even bother to do that. unless the hard disk was actually broken our the part ition table completely screwed I could probably have recovered most of your data. I've even managed to get back hundreds of pictures from a card that had been formatted before now.

If you up use firefox it had the facility to store/sync bookmarks to the web.

Re password strength, yes using symbols is a good thing. Just be sure the thing you are protecting is itself secure....