A friend of my brothers step dad has died. She needs to get access to his laptop to be able to close accounts, tell contacts etc what's happened and generally sort a few things.

 

Problem is the laptop has a password and no one knows it.

 

Not sure what version of Windows it is yet (should be told at some point soon) but is there a way to get rid or change the password? Obviously it's not going to be a legit way, but any sort of boot CD that can do the job?

 

If not, I know if he used Firefox I can put the hard drive in my PC and easily copy the profile over and that will have the passwords saved. IE and Chrome on the other hand....is it possible to do similar?

Offline NT Password and Registry editor aka ntpasswd. Works with all versions of NT based Windows. It won't let you recover the password, but it will allow you to remove it.

Huge Warning: Any encrypted folders or drives will be forever lost if you use this tool to remove the password as the encryption is performed using the password as the salt.

No idea about Chrome and IE.

Ok, so making an image of the hard drive might be an idea before playing with that.

 

Windows doesn't encrypt anything in the User folders by default does it?

No, you have to specifically say you want to encrypt folders.

I thought not, since I've never had anything encrypted without specifically asking for it to be. Hopefully that should do the trick. Thanks!

I'd still be paranoid and backup the disk, just in case there's something encrypted, with the password stored in an email or something.

Definitely this, though I've used it loads with no trouble.

If it's XP, could you try and log in as the local administrator account and just see if he left that password blank? Always worth a try as the account it sets up for you when you install it isn't the built-in administrator one.

I second this post!

And I second this! Loads of XP machines have no Admin password. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete twice on the login screen to bring up the old-school login interface, then try "Administrator" with no password. If this fails, then try the NT Password Reset tool.

Ohhh, good idea.

It's funny that this cropped up, because that's exactly what I was doing at work at the time.

 

I was also trying to stop students from setting a password on their account on our crap netbooks. Do you think you can stop it in XP Home? No you sodding can't.

 

I'm resorting to bunging Pro on them instead :'-(