I have an old laptop running Vista, but can’t remember the password and can’t find the Windows disc.
Can anyone recommend any free software to recover/bypass the password?

Ophcrack should do the job

Ophcrack Windows Password Recovery from USB

@beefheart that would be pretty counterproductive if you could download software to bypass the password. That being said if you can remember that the password was just a simple word without capitalisation of a numbers/special characters then running a dictionary against your login will probably break it, that’s what programms like the one above do

Recovering a Vista password is tricky, security changed after XP. Ophcrack will attempt to recover the password, but it’s a lengthy process and unreliable.

I’d suggest you’re better off with Nordahl’s. This will allow you to reset the password, which is a considerably easier task.

A vista disk will allow you to reset the password, takes a few minutes, while cracking it can take hours.

Oh yeah.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windowsvista/ht/reset-password-windows-vista.htm

(If you don’t have a Vista disc, you might have ‘recover’ on the F8 boot menu)