Has it ever happened to you that you forgot or lost your login password? Many will agree that the situation, frankly, is not the best, because working on a computer is impossible. The impossibility of logging in applies equally to those cases when the terminal has an administrator account that has not given you the necessary rights to perform certain actions or set your own settings, not to mention that you did not give your own password. And if you assume that you need to access the computer immediately? What to do in such a situation?
What is Active Password Changer (Pro)?
Unfortunately, most users who have no idea about how to bypass or crack passwords in Windows immediately try to reinstall the system, believing that there is no other way out. As it turns out, there is! And even very simple! To reset passwords of any type, you can use a small program called Active Password Changer, which removes password combinations from the system in a matter of minutes. To restore access, you don’t even have to use laborious methods associated with booting from the recovery disc and subsequent actions in the registry or procedures for changing passwords in safe mode. We'll talk about how to use Active Password Changer v5 or any other similar modification of the application. But first, let's see what this program can do, that it is recommended to be used as the most powerful medicine, when no other password reset methods help, or you just don’t know how you can use the other available methods of removal, recovery or full removal of password combinations due to their complexity.
Some features of the application
You can describe the functionality of the application for a long time. But in order not to take time, you should limit yourself to only the most basic features, among which the following deserve special attention:
- quick reset of passwords of any type in the stationary mode in the presence of two or more OS (including administrator);
- obtaining complete information about any account registered in the system;
- reset user disconnect settings;
- Disabling password requirements at login;
- deactivation of the Force Smart Card Login option;
- the ability to create bootable media and reset passwords before starting the OS;
- support for all known file structures;
- support for hard drives with volumes of 2 TB or more with different operating modes (IDE, SATA, SCSI, etc.);
- management of temporary login control (allowed and forbidden hours), etc.
Available Versions
Among the modifications of the application that are offered for download, the version of Active Password Changer Professional 5.0 was especially popular, although modifications 7 and 8 can be found on the official resource. Alas, professional-level (Pro) applications are ward ones, and their cost is about $ 50. You can also use ordinary modifications, however, if you compare them with professional ones, the functionality looks clearly limited. Despite this, nothing ever stops our users, so you can look for a working professional modification with an activator on the Internet, although this is, to put it mildly, illegal. Based on this, the following description is provided for informational purposes only.
How to install the app?
If you consider how to use the Active Password Changer, you first need to pay attention to installing the program in the operating system environment, initially assuming that you can log into it, and hacking is subject to the passwords of the administrator or other users. Please note immediately that if logging into the system is impossible under any pretext, you will have to reset the passwords exclusively at startup from a bootable USB flash drive or disk, which will need to be previously created (written) on another working terminal. We will dwell on this a bit later.
In all latest generation Windows systems (7 and above), the installer runs exclusively on behalf of the administrator. If his "account" is disabled, and the level of control over UAC accounts is also reduced to the limit, you can use the usual double-click. In the "Wizard" you just need to follow the prompts of the installer and accept the license agreement.
At the final stage, it will be proposed to immediately launch both the main utility and the tool for creating bootable media. Here - at will.
Speaking about how to use Active Password Changer, if you purchased or downloaded a professional modification from an unofficial source, when you first start the program, you will need to activate it by entering the previously registered login and key. If all the data is entered correctly, a message appears stating that the application has been successfully activated and all restrictions have been removed.
How to use Active Password Changer as a stationary version?
Now you can activate either the search for all available passwords (the first item), or set the search in manual mode.
Suppose manual search is selected. For it, you will need to specify a disk with a partition in which password combinations can theoretically be saved, and then select the desired user account and activate the reset. Please note that usually all combinations are stored only in a special SAM partition, which is located on the system disk, and for it to perform a reset operation will fail. If you have two OS installed, the reset is performed only for the one that is not currently loaded.
Creating a bootable flash drive with a utility
And now again we return to how to use the Active Password Changer, because for the system partition the actions in the stationary program are unsuccessful. In this situation, creating a bootable flash drive will help you. There are two options.
In the simplest case, you can use the tool built into the program, after which you just need to select your drive, check the USB support item in the BIOS, and then, without changing anything, wait for the process to complete.
You can also create an image file, which can then be written to a USB flash drive yourself using programs like Rufus or WinSetupFromUSB. The first utility will automatically set all the options, but for the second it will be necessary to manually specify the NTFS file system, and set Linux ISO as the image.
Start from media and password cracking
Finally, the Active Password Changer Professional program is written to the drive.
Now boot from the flash drive, select the second item to automatically search for all passwords in the system partition.
If the first item is selected, specify the disk (it can be determined even by volume) and press the enter key. Now in the list, select the user (for example, Admin account), enter the corresponding number, after which the application itself will offer additional actions.
Usually, two items are activated, one of which corresponds to the “erasure” of the password. Then simply press Y to confirm the selection and enter key to start the reset. Everything! Your administrator was left without a password.
Epilogue
As you can see, using Active Password Changer in Windows 7 or in any other (newer or even the most hopelessly outdated) OS does not look particularly complicated, since almost all processes are as automated as possible. As a final tip, it remains to say that using the program with creating a bootable USB flash drive or disk seems to be preferable only because the stationary version does not allow you to reset it when you install it in the system partition (which is done by default). However, if there are two operating systems, when one of them is inactive, there will be no problems.