I was asking about what is possible. It seems irresponsible not to password protect sensitive data on laptop. My understanding is that laptop drives have a built in protection that is difficult to break, if it is used.
Regular old Windows logon passwords are easy to get around. Windows has an encryption feature that is very hard to crack but I think it only works on files and / or folders and I assume people rarely use it, but it's good. And the best - and what should've been on this laptop - is a third party program than encrypts the entire hard drive and is nearly impossible to crack.