Passwords With Passwords

Warribs

My female friend Jesseca has seemed to stubble upon a problem in which she cannot handle and gave her laptop, her life so to speak. I obtained:

1) Laptop
2) Power Cable

No cd keys, no discs, no nothing. I need to change the password so she has access to the computer, such a simple problem.

I know this isn't g&t, but if needed I'll request a mod to move it. Thanks for any contributions.

Primesghost

If it's Windows XP then there's a good chance that she's passworded just her own account. Boot into safe mode (press F8 as the computer is starting up and select "Safe Mode"). Once the computer is booted into safe mode you should see an extra account listed: Administrator. When people password their accounts almost everyone forgets to password the Administrator account. Log into the admin account and go to control panel and change her password. Restart and you're done

If you can't get into the Administrator account then you'll have to download a password removal tool. It's usually a boot disk that uses Linux. Let me know if you need this and I'll link to it since I don't feel like digging it up right now.

blincoln

This is the one I use to reset the local admin password:

http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html

If you want to be l33+ and are reasonably sure her password doesn't contain anything other than letters and numbers and is less than 15 characters long, you can instead recover it with the Ophcrack boot CD:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=133599&package_id=167699

Warribs

Thank you guys so much, I can finally clean up the mess of a machine now. Again, thanks.