Vista - No password protection on a removed hard drive?

I am going to have some hardware repairs done on my laptop. In order to make
sure I will not lose any data, I removed the hard drive from the laptop, put
it into a hard drive enclosure, and connected it to a USB port on my desktop
computer. I was able to back up all the HD data from the laptop onto the
desktop.

I was able to access the data for all users on the laptop without having to
enter any user account passwords.

Does this mean that if someone were to steal my laptop and they wanted to
get access to the data for all my user accounts, all they would have to do
is remove the HD, connect it to another computer, and then copy all
unencrypted data?

To put it another way: Is the protection provided by user account passwords
only effective when the hard drive is installed in the computer on which
those user accounts are established?

David

"David" <davmay@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OYvj11JsJHA.4592@xxxxxxThey wouldn't have to remove the harddrive - only to boot from another
OS on a LiveCD disk.
Not even on that computer - that computer running a separate software
environment is enough.

Encryption is king.

That's a great big Ten-Four good buddy. Unless you encrypt the data, and
that is best done with a full disk encrypting hard drive, the HDD can be
accessed via any number of means other than physically removing it from the
laptop.

--
The personal opinion of
Gary G. Little

"David" <davmay@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OYvj11JsJHA.4592@xxxxxx