On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:43:04PM -0800, jdow wrote:
Log in as Administrator (not the visible username.) Then change
the user's password back to something useful.
(ctl-alt-delete twice on the login page gives you the menu that
has Administrator on it. It would take a fairly canny person to
realize that there is an Administrator account to be changed. This
works on XP, at least. I suspect it works on newer versions, too.)
Well, it works on XP Pro; never on XP Home. Reboot to Safe Mode, it'll
probably work on all XP; you can't count the number of installations
I've found that never set the Administrator password.
But it doesn't matter; get P. Nordahl's Offline NT Password & Registry
Editor (
http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/, or the Trinity Rescue
Kit (
http://trinityhome.org). You can crack any Windows password. (I
haven't tried these on Windows 7 yet.)
It's only marginally harder on a Linux system; just boot with the distro
disk.
Cheers,
--
Dave Ihnat
dihnat(a)dminet.com