**A side note before we begin:
This article assumes that the locked computer doesn’t have the Administrator account enabled (which most don’t as it doesn’t come that way). If it is enabled, there are ways to clear the password and create a new one with the boot loader described below. Enjoy!
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I spent a solid hour trying to crack my brother’s Vista password just to get a stupid file off his computer. He’s a smart kid, and likes to program, and knows the importance of a secure password. It’s no wonder I wasn’t able to crack it.

A simple search on the internet told me 2 things.
1) This topic is heavily searched for.
2) Not a lot of people explain how to do it.

The first thing I found in my searches was that there is a secret super-user account called “Administrator” that exists with no password, but is hidden and can’t be accessed normally. To enable it, all you need to do is go into cmd.exe and type:

net user administrator /active:yes

(if you want to disable it, type “no” instead of “yes”)

This led to the first obstacle in my plan: I can’t access cmd.exe without logging into my brother’s account! This is where I was stuck for awhile. I tried lots of things. Holding F8 and starting in safe mode, or command prompt (but the login is still required). Using the Vista install disk hoping there was an option to boot with a command prompt to let me grab the file I wanted (there wasn’t). The only thing I could do with that disk was repair and reformat, which I didn’t want to do because it could possibly erase the file I needed.

A further search on google proved I was thinking along the right track… sort of. I needed a program that would boot before Vista would load and trap me at the login screen. I found one called NTPASSWD from http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/. It is a simple image file that you burn to a CD and boot load.

**For those of you who do not know what boot loading is or how to change the boot order, then I don’t recommend this because you could easily mess up your bios if you change options that don’t need to be changed**

For a basic walk-through, you can visit the programmer’s website:
http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/walkthrough.html

In a nutshell, this program asks where Windows is located on the hard disk and allows the user to perform a few functions. The function of interest being the enabling of the Administrator account. After you enable it, you save what you have done and restart it without the CD. When the Vista login screen appears, you will an account named “Administrator” that you can click on and logon with super-user privileges. There are other functions you can perform with this boot program, but there for our purposes, this is sufficient.

There you have it, 2 minutes to download, 2 minutes to burn, 2 minutes to load, 2 minutes to restart, and you are in the computer in less than 10 minutes with every administrator privilege you need.

**For those of us trying to be sneaky about it, simply disable the Administrator account before you restart the computer and no one will be the wiser.**