With the invention of the personal computer came passwords. You now seem to need passwords for everything.

Tha banks want you to have a password for each credit card and these days if you want to shop online with your credit card or debit card you need a password. Using PayPal? You need a password.

Want to post a comment on this blog (or anybody else’s blog)? You need a password.

First you have to choose a password. The advice given is that you choose an easy to remember password that’s supposed to be only easy to remember by you – not one that anyone else can guess.

I used to be a system administrator for a computer system that had hundreds of users and I can tell you peoples favourite passwords are (in order of preference):

1. Name of Pets

2. Name of one of the children

3. Name of wife (for male users – women didn’t use name of husband very often)

4. Car registration number

All of the top four are easily guessed. So how do you choose a password that isn’t easily guessed that you are going to remember? Well, my favourite group is Queen so I might go for something like: Killer?Queen! or We4Will3Rock2You1. As a card maker who loves our pearlescent card I might opt for Stardream?opaL!crystaL!marS. Using a mix of upper and lower case letters with either punctuation marks or numbers makes the password safer – other people are not likely to guess what it is.

Now that you’ve hit upon a way of making eay to remember passwords how do you remember which ones you’ve used for which credit card\online site\software application. That is a lot more difficult and if you’ve a memory like mine you simply won’t.

If some-one out there has an easy answer to this then please fell free to contribute to this blog. I can only use one of my credit cards online because I can only remember the password to one of my credit cards. If these sites that insist on me having an online account that requires a password are wondering why I only ever shopped with them once it’s because I can’t remember which password I created when I first shopped with them.

When I did the article about the, often uneccesary, creating of online accounts of no benefit to the customer a friend told me she has a document on her computer that lists all her passwords and the company she uses them for. Hardly secure, is it? And what happens if her computer crashes like her last one did? Yes, you can ask companies to email you your password but what a hassle. And the banks certainly won’t email your passwords to you.

Another friend told me she gets around the problem by using the same password for everything. A very dangerous practice.

You can of course, put them all in a document and then password protect the document. This now depends on 2 things: firstly that your computer never crashes and secondly, that you remember the password used to protect the document. And, if you buy a new computer to copy the file to your new computer and delete it from your old one. Still, it’s better than writing your passwords on a piece of paper and pinning it up next to your computer (as one person I know did!)