Sometimes there is a legitimate scenario when you might have to crack a windows password to get into a box.  I was working on cleaning up a laptop that happened to be password protected. The person that I was cleaning up for was more than likely sleeping (at the time I was working on said laptop). Instead of waking the person up I decided to to try and crack it and didn’t have much success.

Instead I decided to use some new software to do the job for me.  After searching I found a great lifehacker article that had screenshots for Ophcrack.  Ophcrack is a live cd that is run on bootup.  I found that it has an intuitive interface and is really easy to use.  There are two versions, Windows XP and Windows Vista.  I tried both and with passwords that were alphanumeric and had special characters.

It was able to crack the Windows XP password but didn’t have much luck with my Vista password.

Download Vista version here.

Download XP version here.

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