Forgot Vista Password - which cracker program works?

RTicUL8

RTicUL8

NAXJA Forum User
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Rocky Mountain High... Colorado!
I have a friend who setup a Sony Vaio Notebook (model VGN-NS135E), took it to Africa (He's a missionary), and promptly forgot the password. It's running windows Vista.
Both he and his wife have tried to remember the password to no avail.
I told him that he could reinstall windows - however, he left the disk in Texas.

I know that there are programs available that can boot the pc and change the password in the registry.
However, I don't know which ones work or not.

So my question is - what programs work to reset or access the password in windows Vista?

===
 
x2, never tried it with Vista, but since its built on the same f*cking platform that Microsoft refuses to get rid of, it should work...
 
Ralph said:
I use ERD Commander.
Click to expand...

I saw that ERD Commander comes in many versions: 2002, v2.0, 2005, 2008, a Microsoft version. etc.
Which one do you have?
Did you burn it to a bootable CD?
Does it have a Graphical User Interface?
Does it make it easy to reset or discover the password?
Or does it required some registry hacking?

Thanks!
 
RTicUL8 said:
I saw that ERD Commander comes in many versions: 2002, v2.0, 2005, 2008, a Microsoft version. etc.
Which one do you have?
Did you burn it to a bootable CD?
Does it have a Graphical User Interface?
Does it make it easy to reset or discover the password?
Or does it required some registry hacking?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I got mine from work. It's the old 2003 version but it still works with Vista. It has a utility called Locksmith that allows you to change the password of any user account including the administrator account. I don't know where you'd get it, but if you download as an ISO, you can then burn it to CD. The CD is bootable.
 
It's not free but I use Spotmau WinCare 2008.
 
I don't know how it works on Vista, but I recommend that everyone get a copy of "The Ultimate Boot CD," which is available free as an ISO disk image, and can also be put on a bootable USB drive. It allows you to boot into any of several versions of Linux as well as Dos, and includes a bunch of recovery utilities, including a password reset, which I recently used to reset an XP password on a found computer. It's a very useful thing to have around, well worth the time it takes to download and burn a copy.
 
Thanks for reminding me of that! I used to have a little Linux floppy disk that was just a password reset utility, but it didn't work with XP....

I'll have to give this a shot :)
 
Also as a side note, if you're running XP and forget your password all you have to do is boot up in safe mode, then you can access the Admin account and change the password of your profile. I haven't tested it with Vista though.
 
XJ98Jeep said:
Also as a side note, if you're running XP and forget your password all you have to do is boot up in safe mode, then you can access the Admin account and change the password of your profile. I haven't tested it with Vista though.
Click to expand...
93XJLI said:
its the same in vista
Click to expand...
XJ98Jeep said:
Then I would do that. It's free and by far the easiest.
Click to expand...
It does NOT work with Vista unless you enabled the account. By default the Administrator is disabled in Vista. At least they Microsoft finally did that, it was a serious hole in XP leaving that open.

On a side note, you guys doing this with XP didn't set a password and rename the Administrator account? Tisk, Tisk.
 
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