I had a memorable experience yesterday. A friend was locked out of their PC. Sounds implausible at first, but she generally uses a MAC and had not used this PC computer in a while…Hence, She forgot the password.
The problem! How do you get into the computer to change the password when you have to get into the computer to change the password…you see the problem!
You can guess my initial reaction, but I Goggled this problem. WOW, the number of searches for this issue was astonishing. This must happen to 100’s of people every day.
I found a number of paid solutions. Many of them required access the Administrators password. Now, if we could have gotten to the Administrator’s level, couldn’t we just fix the problem without assistance? I still haven’t figured that one out.
Eventually, I found Ophcrack and we were able to recover the Password for free.
I took this lesson to heart and downloaded a copy onto a CD for myself and put it in a safe place should I ever need it. I suggest you do the same.