I cannot remember my windows 7 password. How do I bypass it or recover it? [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
I forgot my Windows 7 password. What now?

I cannot remember my windows 7 password. How do I bypass it or recover it? This is a brand new computer that came with windows 7 already installed on it.

Answer 1

Offline NT Password and Registry Editor.

Quote from their site:

• This is a utility to reset the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista/Win7 etc system.

• You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.

• It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppydisk or CD or another system.

• Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled out user accounts! There is also a registry editor and other registry utilities that works under linux/unix, and can be used for other things than password editing.

Answer 2

Lifehacker had an interesting couple of links on this a short time ago.

Answer 3

The easiest thing to do in the case where the password was added recently, without using third party software, is to boot to the Windows CD (if you have one! but I think any Windows 7 disk should work) and do a manual System Restore to before you set the password (you can't do this in Windows itself without the admin password, obviously!)

If you haven't put much on the machine yet that you care about losing, you might just do a complete factory recovery - I'd need to know details of the machine to advise how you'd go about this but pretty much all major OEMs ship some method of doing it these days.

I highly also recommend you make a password reset disk so this doesn't happen - this option is on the sidebar in the User Accounts settings (where you'd actually go to make or change your password) and I believe it may give you a link when you actually set a password as well.