Haven’t booted up one of my laptops for a while and the battery was completely flat. I also can’t log in. I haven’t forgotten my password but it seems as though the laptop has – could this be because the battery was flat?

Anyway, can anyone recommend a password cracker / removal tool that is safe to use – needs to be an offline, downloadable one as (obviously) I can’t log in to go online.

Cheers

Jumpers on the mother board or reinstall the OS

Don’t really want to burn it down and start again (difficult as I didn’t create recovery discs!) as it would take me three days to rebuild it anyway… and don’t really want to take it apart (and wouldn’t know how to do the ‘jumpers on the motherboard’ thing!)

There appear to be several password removal tools out there – any recommendations?

Windows can’t forget a password because of a flat battery.

Are you sure its the windows password and not a bios password.

as above, your either typing the wrong password or your looking at the bios not windows screen.

What MSP said. Is it definitely the Windows logon PW you require?

Recovering an NT6 password is… non-trivial. You can change it with a bit of hackery, though.

This thread has some hints: –

Linky

Definitely the Windows password – and I’m sure I haven’t forgotten it!

Sorry Shakey – Linky seems to be dead.

Linky

Should work now!

Check you haven’t got capslock or numlock on.

bit of knowledge required but this will do the trick:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/