Confessions of a G33k

deleting windows passwords

Bill has a very interesting post on how to manage Windows NT/2K passwords the dirty way in an enterprise setting (Scroll down, he's on Blogger and it's his Wednesday, June 18th entry.)

I'm not on my Win machine right now, but it does make sense that you would have to work with the SAM file. Also, it reminded me of the trick you use on 95/98/ME (I think ME) machines where you can remove a person's account logon* by renaming the username.pwl file to username.old and then on the subsequent reboot, don't enter any data and press the enter key. By doing that, you basically make a universal account with no password.

*For any of you who have installed those OSes, you can (in theory) make a user account for each user. However, in reality the user account idea did not work too well in 95/98/ME and was not properly implemented on the consumer OSes since you could bypass the logon window by clicking the Cancel button. What I'm talking about is when some people upon installing the (now older) OSes, would put in a username and password because they were prompted to. And where I come into the picture is that they forget the username and the logon window annoys the heck out of them and they want me to get rid of it.