The best things in life are free. And it's a good job, too, in this day and age of evaporating money. You can bet that as the global recession marches onwards, more and more users will be looking for bargain - particularly freeware - programs. SafeHouse Explorer falls under the free price tag bracket, and it aims to make your PC or flash drive a more secure place.

Maybe you've got some secret files you don't want anybody else reading. That Word document of mama's secret recipe for Bolognese sauce, perhaps. Or that video you most definitely don't want leaked onto the Internet. Whatever the material or file type, SafeHouse Explorer creates a data vault on your drive to securely stash it away.

Creating a vault is a straightforward process. Just click on 'new volume', pick a location, choose a name for the vault, its size and then finally a password. A 100MB vault takes around 10 seconds to create and the maximum size goes up to a mountainous 2,000GB. SafeHouse Explorer creates a shortcut to the vault on the desktop, and opening it is just a matter of double-clicking and entering the password.

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The vault is assigned a drive volume letter, and appears under Windows Explorer as E: (or whichever the next available letter is). It looks like and functions just the same as Explorer, too, and files can be dragged and dropped straight in. Data placed in the vault is subjected to 256-bit encryption, and if you select 'secure move' when you drag files in, the program will securely delete the original copy of the file on the hard disk, overwriting it with garbage data. A neat touch.

Once the vault is closed (accompanied by a big clunking sound effect), no one can get at your protected files unless they have the password. Which hopefully they don't (unless you wrote it on a stick-it note slapped to the side of your monitor).

What if you want a vault on your flash drive? That's easily done, as the volume can simply be copied over onto the portable disk, and as long as the program executable is copied as well, it can be opened. SafeHouse Explorer also allows the user to create a self-extracting executable with the vault and program combined, which can then be emailed to friends.

Another useful feature is that the data vault is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft applications, so it's possible to open documents directly inside it. There's no need to move them out of the secure area to work on them.

The only issue you should be aware of here is that you've got to be careful not to forget your vault password(s), as there's no way of resetting them, or retrieving locked away data unless you've got the professional edition of the program. Still, that's one reason to upgrade if you're going to be using SafeHouse Explorer heavily.

A useful piece of security software that's easy to get to grips with and provides an excellent range of features given that it's freeware. For serious use it might be worth considering an upgrade to the pro version, as that allows for forgotten password reset in certain circumstances, though that could be considered a security risk for some people.