Recover Your Windows Password

There are times when you can't log in your Windows account. Either because your mind is playing tricks on you or you are at a new workplace and the former employee forgot to give it to you, you need to find a way to fix this situation. Frankly speaking, the easiest way to regain control over your system would be to use a password recovery bootable flash disk. You can do this by going to the User Accounts section in the Control Panel and selecting the Create a password reset disk option. Once that's done, restarting the computer with the disk inside should give you access to a reset password button.

Another good way to solve this issue is by using third party applications. According to a lot of websites, this is the best solution but what they don't get is that most of the times you are forced to do it on your own while you are pretty much locked out of your own computer. Fortunately, there is a solution that works easily and all you need is a Windows installation disk (or stick). I'll show you how to do it.

1.  Restart your computer and boot from the Windows installer disk.
2. Choose the desired language, click next, then select the Repair my computer option.
3. Click on the operating system that you are trying to regain control off and pay attention to drive where it is installed on. The vast majority of times it will be on drive C: so I will give you all of the commands accordingly.  But if it's on another drive, simply replace the letter from the command lines and it will work. Press next.
4. In the lower side of the list with recovery tools you will see an entry named command prompt. Click it and the fun can begin.
5. Once the command prompt window appeared (it's a Dos-like dark window with a white cursor) type in this command: copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\ and press Enter.
6. Now write this: copy /y c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe and type Enter.
7. Exit and restart your computer (take out the Windows installation disk or choose not to use it).
8. While in the Windows login screen quickly press the Shift button on your keyboard 5 times and another command prompt window will show up.
9. Now input this command: net user <username> <password> but replace username with the name of your Windows account and the password with a new Windows password that you will hopefully not forget again. (Also don't type the "<" and  ">" signs in the actual command).
10. Exit the CMD window and use your new password to log in your freshly recovered Windows account.

Explanation: if you are curios about what you've just done, I will tell you. Windows has a feature called sticky keys which triggers an action every time you press the Shift button on your keyboard too many times. Fortunately, this is activated even if no user is logged in a Windows account. Now, to be able to change the password you need to get to the CMD (command prompt) window, but sadly you can only access when you are logged in. So we used the bootable disk to trick Windows into prompting the CMD window when sticky keys are activated. Don't worry, it's not a permanent change. The first line of command that you wrote created a back up of the original sticky keys command. To set it back the way it was you need to boot your computer with the Windows installation disk once again, retake all the steps until you reach the CMD window, and once the type: copy /y c:\sethc.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe and press enter. Exit and reboot without the Windows installation disk and everything should be back to normal.