I just want to share my experience from this week, cracking a Windows 7 admin password on my HP Pavilion laptop I5.

My brother-in-law had done contract work for Microsoft last year. He's very well off financially, and when his contract was up, he had a very nice extra laptop that Microsoft had given as part of the contract. Microsoft installed an admin password, and for whatever reason, kept it secret from my bro-in-law, so he couldn't access admin functions. When his contract ended, he gave me the laptop, and I've only been able to sign in as a guest.

Long story short, now that I'm studying for the A+, I needed to get admin access. So I used Trinity Rescue Kit 3.4 http://trinityhome.org to crack the password, which I had to run a few times, but it worked. I log on to the computer, without an admin password, and the desktop is empty! My hard drive seemed completely wiped. I then downloaded and ran Recuva from Piriform http://www.piriform.com/recuva and it found ALL of my deleted files.

It was a scary but fulfilling week!

You could have saved yourself a hole lot of trouble if you would have just used a UBCD. You can boot the PC from a Live disc or USB and then reset the password, 15 minutes and your done. Do yourself a favor and build out a UBCD and make a few copies.

Impressive program list for this UBCD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/. Which program in the list would you use as the admin pass cracker? The only one I recognized setup for cracking is Kon-boot. I actually tried Kon-boot, and 5 other linux shell crackers before running Trinity. Trinity worked for me. But it was my final try.

I don't see how the UBCD would save a lot of trouble, I'd still need to crack the password wouldn't I? Is there a free UBCD you recommend? Link?

Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.

You can try ophcrack http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/

If you have physical access to the machine and time ... you are 90% of the way to "owning" the machine.

Granted that Microsoft has encrytion (bitlocker, Bit locker to go) kerberose and other encryption, authorization and integrity schemes, algo's used to slowdown, delay, stop, "prevent" unathorize access.

But, there is a reason Data centers spend so much money on limiting access to the machines. They would be satisfied with the use of cardkey systems, locked doors, guards, biometics - etc. if passwords were all that were necessary. A tiered approach to security - designed to be more complex, the closer you get to the prize, is what is needed. Losing a cardkey is not good, but is preferable to the loss of network, Server, system or administrator password.