Choose Strong Passwords and Improve Security

Well we all use passwords online for our various accounts - Be it email, shopping or banking. But having a strong password will make the difference between a secured
identity and one which can be easily cracked.
For example a password of 4 characters consisting of all Characters lower and upper case can be cracked in just 1.36 minutes by a mainstream desktop PC.
whereas a password of 8 characters consisting of all Characters will take average computer 2.10 centuries to crack assuming that you are using a random combination of upper and lower case characters and not any dictionary word.
The best password will be a combination of lower and upper case characters as well as special characters like _ (underscore) and - (dash).
More details on the relative strength of passwords is given in How Weak Passwords can be Hacked