That was a problem back then as you had to remember a new password several times a year. It happened more than once that a user who had changed the password the day before simply could not remember it. You had to walk to the IT department to get a temporary password which you then had to use to log in and change the account password once more.

While it is not possible to use password resetters in a corporate environment, you probably do not have the same restrictions on your home computer or in a small business network.

Windows users who are cautious may have created a Windows password reset disk in advanced which they can then use to reset the account password.

If you have not, you have still plenty of options to reset the pass. Before I look at tools for the job, I’d like to point out a few options that may or may not be available to you.

One of those options is to log in with an administrator account, or ask someone to do that, to reset the password. The admin needs to run the following command on a command line prompt:

Local Password Reset

net user user_name new_password

Replace user_name with the name of the user and new_password with the new user password for the account.

Remote Password Reset

net user user_name * /domain

This command can be used to change the account password of a remote user. Replace user_name with the name of the user and /domain with the domain. You are then prompted to enter the new password for that user.

Sometimes though you may not have another administrator account to log in and change the user password. Your best bet in this case is to use a so called password resetter to reset or restore the account password. Depending on the program, you will either be able to see your old Windows password or get a new password to log in with.

We did cover a few applications in the past for that job, including Trinity Rescue Kit which you can burn to disc, write to USB or run over a computer network. You can check out our review here: Reset Windows Passwords if you cannot login anymore

Another program is Ophcrack, which comes as an ISO image which you have to burn to CD. You then boot from the CD and use the program to recover the passwords. This happens more or less automatically, and very fast. Depending on your system and password length, it could take less than a minute to reveal the password.

Offline NT Password supports resetting the password on all versions of Windows from Windows NT all the way up to Windows 7. It is likely that the program will work with future versions of Windows as well as the developer continues to improve it regularly. The program is offered as a Password reset CD or USB bootdisk. Please note that the password resetter is not using a fancy interface, all is handled on the command line.

You basically need to mount the partition or hard drive your Windows operating system is stored on. You then need to supply the path to the Windows Registry directory and have then all options available to reset some or even all user account passwords on that machine. You can download the application from the official site. New users should check out the instructions which guide through the password resetting process.

A second option is the free program PC Login Now which can be used to remove the password from an account. This basically sets the password to empty so that Windows won’t ask for a password when the user logs in on the system the next time.

You can download the software from the developer website.

Have you used different methods to reset a Windows account password? Lets hear them in the comment section below.

The password recovery software supports both dictionary and brute force methods. The first relies on known words while the second method will test all possible character combinations. A dictionary attack can only be successful if the creator has chosen a dictionary word as the password. Using dictionaries as the recovery method can be much faster than the brute force approach.

The recovery software is easy to use. All that needs to be done is to load a password protected zip file into the program’s interface. A dictionary has to be loaded if the dictionary recovery method is selected. The brute force recovery method requires a few additional parameters. The range of characters has to be selected as well as the minimum and maximum length of the password.

The password recovery software did test 13503531 passwords in 137 seconds on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 system with 4 Gigabytes of computer memory and a Intel Core Duo processor with 3.0 GHz. It would still take hundreds of years to test all possible password combinations of a size between 3 and 12 characters (alphanumerical).

Brute forcing makes therefor only sense if the password length is not greater than 6 unknown chars. It should also be noted that the recovery time is the maximum time needed. If the password length is lower it will not take that long.

The developer’s website contains dictionaries that can be used in the password recovery software.