There are two ways to get into your
PC: the easy way and the hard way.
If there are any other administrator-level accounts on your PC, the easy way
is to log in to one of those accounts, open the User Accounts page in Control
Panel, and change your password there.
If yours is the only administrator account, you??™ll have to reset your password
the hard way. (This won??™t work if your drive is protected by BitLocker
Drive Encryption, described earlier in this chapter.) Start by downloading
the free Trinity Rescue Kit from http://www.trinityhome.org/, and burn the
ISO image to a blank CD.
Next, boot your PC with the Trinity Rescue Kit disc, which is essentially a
bootable Linux CD. At the prompt, type
winpass -u username
where username is your login name. The software will then search your hard
disk for Windows installations, display a list of any it finds, and ask you to
choose one.
Logon and Profile Options | 491
Users and
Security
At this point you??™ll be asked to either provide a new password or type
merely * (asterisk) to choose a blank password. Confirm that you wish to
change the password, and you??™ll be sent back to the terminal prompt when
it??™s done.
Now, restart your PC to log in to your newly unlocked Windows account.
Prevent Users from Shutting Down
Among the restrictions you may want to impose on others who use your
computer is that of shutting down Windows. For instance, if you??™re logging
in remotely, as described in ???Control Your PC Remotely??? in Chapter 7, you??™ll
want to make sure that your PC is always on.
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