mother's boyfriend changed her password....

[ahoier]

It's Windows Vista I believe.....not Windows 7 or 8.....the PC is a couple years old....2010 she got it or so if that gives you an idea.....

Yea....they had a dispute and he changed her password......before being hauled away in cuffs....


Is there anyway I can get access to her account? No, contacting him isn't an option, we have a no contact order.....secondly, he's a horrible spellar, and thirdly.....was highly intoxicated at said event.....so likely "forgot" the password anyhow....court date not til the 30th.....meanwhile she's got bills to pay and can't use her computer....

Any ideas? Other than formatting/Recovery? Yes, I did try the "reset password" option, but we never created a "password recovery disk".....

 

[Artem]

What does her old laptop have to do with paying the bills? Have her log into her accounts from your computer and make the payments.

Perhaps some of the other nerds can help with your password problem as I'm not too computer savvy

 

[FoxS]

There is a way to do this. I did it once on Vista and was surprised how easy it was.

Google search terms like Vista password locked and you should come up with the answer

 

[ahoier]

yes, that's what she'll be doing temporarily. But mine is so slow, old eMachines with Windows Vista and only 512MB RAM and runs like a snail

Thanks for the swift reply anyways

 

[earlyre]

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/passrecovery.htm

 

[The_Jeff]

^ yeah all that.

I did this years ago with something for NT/XP. Good to see the hackers are keeping up with the OSs.

 

[Brandon Gatz]

you can crack the password in 30 seconds.

download and burn Hiren's Boot CD(HBCD), boot from it, choose Active Password Changer from the list of programs.

The Geek Squad MRI disk can do it too. Using bittorrent, search for "MRI SoldierX" . Burn, boot, choose Samuarai password cracker.

 

[uc50ic4more]

You may also, as a "Plan B", use an Ubuntu live CD to access all of the data on the hard drive without ever having to boot into Windows, depending on what measures might have been taken from within Windows to block that method (for example, if she encrypted her data from within Windows, my suggestion will not help you).

If you choose to do this, either post here or PM me for further instructions if you need them. Good luck!

 

[bepperb]

Well the question I would have is can you burn a CD on your computer and then boot to it from your mothers computer? If you can do that it's pretty easy, if not we can help you with those steps.

The ubuntu live CD is a good option to immediately recover any files you need, and ubuntu is pretty friendly for a first time user.

 

[zrxkawboy]

Originally Posted By: ahoier
he's a horrible spellar,


LOL!

 

[Doog]

Just another reason I always set up an administrator account on every new computer.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Originally Posted By: Doog
Just another reason I always set up an administrator account on every new computer.


When I used to set up Windows systems for people, I would add a user called "webuser [guest]" and one called "admin". I would set absurdly long passwords for both; but the "admin" account had darn-near zero privileges for disk access, network access, etc. while the "webuser [guest]" account was the real administration account. I figured that was enough to dissuade all casual intrusion attempts!

 

[SwampSurvivor]

At my old job, most of the end users (there were various clients that he served) had administrative priviliges on their computers.

Some of the people would infect their computer on a weekly basis (if not more ...). These same people would also CONSTANTLY forget their password.

I got pretty familiar with the Linux based password cracking CDS.

We ended up taking everyone's administrative priviliges away ... since they would always screw up the computer ... and then create another administrative account on the computer.

It was a bit messed up ... Every client had an AD domain, but none of the computers were joined to the domain.

Never understood that.

 

[ahoier]

well, stumbled upon pogostick...that was able to reset it

Apparantly, Windows 7 is different than XP.....with XP it was as simple as booting into safe mode, going to the hidden Admininstrator account, then changing the password to said "locked" account...lol.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Originally Posted By: ahoier
well, stumbled upon pogostick...that was able to reset it

Apparantly, Windows 7 is different than XP.....with XP it was as simple as booting into safe mode, going to the hidden Admininstrator account, then changing the password to said "locked" account...lol.


... So the grand takeaway here is that if you are a Windows user, someone need only spend a few minutes at a motor oil forum to find out how to gain access to your password-protected account!