Windows 7 Password Recovery PCMag. You probably wont forget your own Windows account password, but you may well need to help a friend or relative who did. Business ownerslaid off anyone lately A disgruntled employee might well lock your businesss main PC with an unknown password just before leaving Even without ill will, an employee might take another job or perish the thought succumb to illness without passing on the password. This could be devastating for a small business. What can you do Be Prepared. Windows 7 accounts come in two flavors, Standard and Administrator. In a business, you can head off many password problems by ensuring that all day to day activities occur under Standard accounts. Do keep one Administrator level account active, with a strong password known only to you. Thats also a good plan for the family computer. Give everyone Standard accounts and retain one Administrator account just for you. When its necessary to install new programs or take other Administrator actions, go over and enter the password in the User Account Control window. Sure, its a tiny effort, but Windows 7 doesnt ask for that password as much as Vista did. In earlier versions of Windows, you could press CtrlAltDel at the Welcome screen to get an old style entry box for username and password. You would enter the username Administrator, along with the corresponding password, to log in with the Administrator account. Of course, that only works when you know the Administrator password. Windows 7 hides the Administrator account by default, and the CtrlAltDel trick doesnt work. Yes, by tweaking the Registry you can put Administrator on the Welcome screen. However, since any user with Administrator level privileges can change the main Administrator password, theres no big benefit to doing so. If you ensure that nobody other than yourself can use the PC with Administrator privilege, you should be safe from password lockout. Be Prepared, Part Two. Suppose you werent prepared suppose that disgruntled ex employee had an Administrator level account and changed the passwords for all Administrator level accounts yes, he could do that. Or suppose your dear uncle has simply forgotten his password from one day to the next. You can use a password reset disk to reset the accounts password and thereby regain access to the system. Of course, you can only do that if you already prepared the reset disk, so do that right now. Launch Control Panel, click User Accounts, and click the link Create a password reset disk at left. Follow the prompts to create a bootable diskette or USB drive that will let you reset your password. Then store it somewhere safe. Consider doing the same for relatives when you pay them a visit. Get Your Geek On. There are a number of very intricate techniques to reset the password for a Windows 7 user account. Windows 7 and Vistas System Recovery Options menu and therefore the Command Prompt formerly the Recovery Console can be accessed in at least three ways. This. Many start with Windows Recovery Environment RE. When you boot from the Windows 7 DVD and choose Repair, it boots into Windows RE. Once Windows RE is running, you can open a Command Prompt, perform offline Registry editing, and more. If you know what youre doing, you can dig into the Registry, change just the right byte in the data for a specific binary Registry value, and thereby enable the Administrator account. Another trick involves temporarily replacing the program file for Windows Sticky. Keys feature with CMD. EXE. Once thats done, you can press Shift five times at the Welcome screen to invoke Sticky. Keys. This will open a Command Prompt from which you can reset your password by typing the right command. However, for most users these techniques are just too arcane, and a mistake could cause serious trouble. If youve got the skills to perform these tricky password reset techniques, you can surely find full details on the Internet. Get Help. Companies like Passcape Software, Elcomsoft, and others offer Windows password recovery tools at a reasonable price. Free tools are also available, though youll want to check reviews before making a choice. Once youve recovered the password youre home free. Do be sure to choose a password recovery tool, not a password reset tool. If the user encrypted any files using Windowss built in Encrypting File System, resetting the password will make those files inaccessible. Yes, Elcomsoft and others offer tools to crack EFS encrypted files, but you can avoid that potential problem by recovering rather than resetting the password. Follow Up. Now that youve regained access to the system, go back and follow the initial advice in this article. Set all the user accounts to Standard except for one Administrator account that only you can access. For day to day activity, use one of the Standard accounts. And create a password reset disk, just in case. That way you wont get burned again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2017
Categories |