If you want to maintain a better security setup than mentioned in the article above (and for Windows), you can use TrueCrypt[1], which has some nice schemes to protect your data, even if someone forces you to leak out your password. You can even maintain virtual drives that are completely encrypted and can be mounted when needed. Do check it out!
I am wary of truecrypt. It is open source, but the development is not open. It's also "exceedingly difficult to generate binaries from source that match the binaries provided by Truecrypt (due to compiler options, etc.)"[1]
[1]http://www.truecrypt.org