As a computer technician I do a lot of tasks that by now are considered common occurrences to me, but I think perhaps others would find such tutorials extremely useful. This is the first of hopefully a handful of such tutorials on things that I do daily, little tips, tricks, and helpful programs, that make my life easier and probably will have the same effect for yours. We begin with the notorious logon password for Windows. Strong, Safe, and impenetrable? Think again.

Every once in awhile I have the occasional customer come in that needs a simple task done. They’ve either forgotten their password, they don’t have the Administrator password, or they’ve acquired the laptop from someone who didn’t know the password. As a rule of thumb we are taught to have long passwords that include letters and numbers, capitalization, and hard-to-guess strings. One would therefore think that these passwords are harder to crack, which is true. But the distinction comes in whether one is trying to crack the password or simply reset it to something else which turns out to be a much simpler task.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

The tool I use the most is the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor simply because it’s fast and does the job in 90% of the cases. The website also has a pretty extensive walkthrough with visuals that might be worth a look. That being said it does require you to navigate through command-line prompts and if that intimidates you I would suggest skipping this tutorial and instead subscribing to my RSS feed. I will be posting about a few graphical tools that allow you to do this kind of thing in the next few days.

This tool runs off a bootdisk so the first thing you will need to do is grab the image and burn it to a CD (Floppy images are also available on the site). You will need to shutdown the computer and boot from the CD. Your laptop or desktop might have a keyboard shortcut (Most Dell laptops are F12, Many computers I run into also use F8) or you may have to boot into the BIOS (Usually F2 or the DEL key will do that) and find the option to change the boot order.

Once the tool is running you can feel comfortable accepting many of the default settings (which are noted by being surrounded by [bracket symbols]). Here is a run down of each question you will need to answer along with the default choice. To choose the default just hit enter, or if choosing a different option type the appropriate number/name from the list.

1. First screen is simply to boot the program, go ahead and hit enter unless you’re doing any of the advanced boot options listed.
2. After loading a bunch of drivers and recognizing devices you should finally get a menu with 1 or more hard-drives detected in the system. If you only have one drive and its listed as #1 go ahead and just hit enter for the default [1], otherwise type the # of the drive that holds your windows installation.
3. The location of the windows system folder is needed. In most cases this should automatically default to the correct folder, WINDOWS/System32/config. If this is correct just hit enter, if not type in the correct path.
4. Our next choice is what we want to do on that drive, which if you’re following this tutorial happens to be password editing so [1] Password Reset is the correct choice which happens to be the default, go ahead and hit enter.
5. The next screen will provide a few more options related to password resetting but again, the first and default option of [1] Edit User Data and Passwords is what we want. Hit enter.
6. Here we have a list of all the users along with their current permissions and status. From this list go ahead and choose the user would like to reset the password for.
7. If the user is locked out it will automatically ask if you would like to unlock the user and reset the password count. Generous huh? Go ahead and hit yes. If the user was not locked or disabled you will skip this step and go directly to #8.
8. This part is pretty basic. You have the choice of blanking the password or setting a new one as well as changing permissions and unlocking accounts. I always choose to blank the password because this seems to be much more compatible with XP and Vista (oh yes, this works on Vista too). Your mileage may vary.
9. Now we’re going to !quit by typing the exclamation mark and then “q” on the next screen.
10. Before the program is done it has to do one last very important task, and that is to write the changes to the system (otherwise what is the point?). If you skip this step you will not have reset anything and will have to start over so make sure to type “y” for yes here and write those changes to the system.
11. Once you get verification that the changes were written you can pop the cd out, reboot, and log in with the new credentials you have set.

Of course to quote a corny line from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. Use this tool to reset your own accounts. Don’t be a tool and reset your friend’s account. That’s not cool. Keep an eye on this blog or subscribe to my RSS feed and I’ll be posting a few graphical tools that allow you to do everything we’ve done here without all the command-line garbeldy gook.