Forgotten Administrator Password

[Ganz Doof]

I have a laptop running Vista Business which gives me three ways to log on
to the PC:
1) User Account (working fine)
2) Fingerprint reader / User Account (working fine)
3) Administrator Account (FORGOTTEN PW - cannot log in)

For a long time I used the laptop without any problem, as I logged on to the
User Account. But now I need Admin access and have forgotten the admin pw,
naturally without having created some sort of an password recovery disk.

How can I recover or reset the Admin PW? I can login to the PC just fine,
but cannot execute certain functions which require an Admin login.

Any ideas?

[Malke]

If you only made the one account with Administrative privileges, then use
NTpasswd (a Linux password reset disk) to change that account's password to
a blank. Then log into that account and change the password to something
you will remember. Write it down somewhere.

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Because the built-in Administrator account is disabled in Vista, I like to
make at least two user accounts with Administrative privileges along with a
standard user account for daily work. You can always log in automatically
to your daily account if you don't want to see the extra accounts on the
Welcome Screen.

[LeeTutor]

I can vouch for Malke's suggestion. I've seen it used many times
successfully. The best option is to reset the password, however. It is
a rather "geeky" tool; not a nice Windows graphical user interface. You
might want to check this page for a demonstration of its use, with
screenshots provided in the article:
'Reset lost Windows passwords with Offline Registry Editor | Microsoft
Windows |
There is also a video about using this tool here:
'Video: Reset Windows passwords with the Offline NT Password and

[Rosco Whitney]

Here's a documented a step by step solution here:

This one is for most flavours of Windows

This is for Windows XP only:

[tina1203]

do you forget windows password? If you do, you'd better reset the password with the third part password recovery tool. As far as I know, windows password unlocker is safe and easy to use. An .ISO file included in windows password unlocker. So, you just need to free download windows password unlocker, which is available at many download sites like softpedia.com