[headwayne]

of this straight ? by the time i have pwords and unames for my business etc,a parent and an in-law for everything from financial,medical, utility, subscriptions and have it in the respective notebooks. Guess what I am forced to come up with new ones and we start all over again. in less than a yrs time they get changed.
Curious how others keep all this straight. Do you just go about the business of changing everything at one time once the requirement to change occurs or what?? There may be some insanity popping up in my family fairly soon and it will begin with me.

Then there is the rogue site that never has things working and you can have the current info sitting in front of you and no the caps are not on and there comes that darn lock. of course it always occurs on an important ins benefit challenge.

Does anyone have any suggestions or examples of how you have solved this issue.?? throwing it all to the winds is not an option thank you

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There is password keeper software, but it's no good if your computer blows up. I am curious what others do, too. I tend to use the same passwords or variations of the same ones which is NOT a good solution, or a text file on my flash drive which is an even worse no-no. My friends that I've built computers for would be surprised to know they all have the same admin password. But it's easy for me to get into them when they need fixed.
Johanna

[Johanna]

There is password keeper software, but it's no good if your computer blows up. I am curious what others do, too. I tend to use the same passwords or variations of the same ones which is NOT a good solution, or a text file on my flash drive which is an even worse no-no. My friends that I've built computers for would be surprised to know they all have the same admin password. But it's easy for me to get into them when they need fixed.
Johanna

[Cold Titanium]

I just memorize them all. It's really not that hard. 15-20 characters is pretty basic...Unfortunately, where I work most passwords are appallingly easy to guess.

Gee, what are the names of your children? What's your last name? Arrghg!

If I were in charge, I would just have them memorize them. And then change them every 30 days.

Or maybe I'm just a self-absorbed jerk...

[123Runner]

I would just have them memorize them

Thats easy for some of you to say. Its even more difficult as you get up to your senior years.

I don't know if there is even 1 good answer on this subject.

The best would be to memorize them all. Keep in mind that for each one you use it needs to be different so you might have 50+ passwords to memorize. If you change them every 30 days, it makes it even harder.

I heard (need to do some research) that there is a program that stores all your passwords and you only have to memorize 1 to get into it.

I guess maybe a excel or word document that is passworded to open might work also.

[dsenette]

i'll have to scour the intertubes for the link again, but there's a website that you can create a completely random password (or multiples), then it prints out a color coded index card for you. it's sort of like a cypher matrix. the letters don't line up at all and the colors have no direct meaning. but you create a password for each of your online accounts from a row on the card (vertical (up or down) horizontal (left or right) or diagonal) then all you have to remember is that your bank account is column1 and your email is row 6

[dsenette]

http://www.passwordcard.org/ well that didn't take too long

[Johanna]

I can see me with a color wheel trying to remember if the bank is left or right!

One important thing for passwords- have a dedicated email address that is online (Yahoo, Gmail, MSN or the like) not the one that comes with your ISP. If you move, you lose your ISP address, and maybe access to whatever password retrieval system the website has for you to recover a password. If you don't plan to move and you have web email from your ISP, terrific. But use that online account for all your site registrations. Make the password to that special account unique and never ever use it anywhere else. If you are 1000 miles from home and can't get on your own computer with friendly IE remembering all your passwords for you (because you'd never let your laptop remember a sensitive password, right?) then you can just ask the site to send an email to your online acccount so that you can log on. And the site will, because they presume only you have access to the registration email account. So after logging on, change your password to whatever you thought it was supposed to be. Can you tell I've been through this familiar routine a few times?
Johanna

[headwayne]

Thank you everyone I am considering all your info for myself and a friend that got stuck with all their mailing list being hacked and money request and a sad story being sent to the list.. No they were not sent any money because the person that did it did not have much imagination or insight. THANK YOU. anymore info is still welcome as we ponder our options.

Edited by headwayne, 21 June 2010 - 02:19 PM.

[dsenette]

I can see me with a color wheel trying to remember if the bank is left or right!

well, it's a good system, but it's not old people proof

FYI, i'm 3 hours to the left of you today, if you feel like taking a drive i'll buy you dinner haha

[123Runner]

There are also Password managers.

Keepass
PasswordSafe

And this one was reviewed by PCWorld and is a online password storage.
Passpack online manager