Coworker gets new computer, locked out in seconds

[pparks1]

Funny story,

Today, a coworker goes out and buys a new laptop for her daughter for the holidays. She asks me my opinion on this particular HP laptop which is positive, especially for the price. We've had an HP laptop for a couple of years at home and it's just fine.

So, she gets the laptop at lunch and decided to take it out of the box and set it up in her office. She manages to input a password, but was apparently not aware of where her fingers were or what they typed and after making a couple of changes for her daughter, is uninstalling McAfee and installing ESET instead and has to reboot. Yep, sure enough, she cannot log in.

She calls me over and says, this stupid laptop won't let me in. She says she apparently doesn't know her password and blames it on HP and Microsoft....saying it's their fault and dumb on their behalf to not immediately encourage the creation of a password recovery disk or just allowing her to reset her password from the login screen (unsure where the security would be if it were that simple).

So, I managed to get her password blanked out for her and she is happily on her way again with the new laptop. It's nice getting a break from real tasks at work for a few minutes.

 

[Maguscreed]

I made the mistake of letting someone know I could pull windows passwords when vista came out and wound up getting calls from friends of friends of friends to help them with their password problems.

It's not really something you want to get out...

 

[pparks1]

I would think that pretty much any IT techie who works anywhere near a help desk team should have the skills or probably already goes through this exercise on a regular basis. It's certainly not the first time that I have been asked to help out with such situations. I used to work in a place that allowed everybody to be local admin and they would sometimes go in and change the local admin password, then we would pull a machine off the domain and then find out the Administrator password had been changed and they didn't remember.

Notice, i didn't offer and guidance as to how I actually did it. This wasn't intended to be a tutorial for kids to break into parents computers.

 

[boohbah]

Notice, i didn't offer and guidance as to how I actually did it. This wasn't intended to be a tutorial for kids to break into parents computers.

aw! go on sparky, tell us!.

 

[pparks1]

aw! go on sparky, tell us!.

Most here wouldn't want to use my methods anyway as they involve "gasp" terminal commands from within Linux. There is no GUI, you don't need a mouse :sarc:

From repeated posts of people who give Linux a shot, they often undeniably "hate the fact that they have to type commands in a terminal". It's honestly, one of my favorite things about that OS.

 

[The Howling Wolves]

Notice, i didn't offer and guidance as to how I actually did it. This wasn't intended to be a tutorial for kids to break into parents computers.

aw! go on sparky, tell us!.

Admin password was...............................................password

 

[pparks1]

^ always try the obvious. Go with the simplest solution first. And never believe anything the end user tells you. All Help Desk 101.

 

[Maguscreed]

'Break' into computers?

Well that's easy.
Here is a complete illustrated guide.