How to get rid of Vista Administrative Password

Trick 1: System Restore
This only works in cases where you changed your password to something new and then forgot it or deleted a user account by accident. In order for this to work, there must be a System Restore point at which a logon was successful for the problem account. Also, this is not a problem if you are in a domain environment because the Domain Administrator can always reset your password.
1. The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure you have your Windows Vista DVD or a repair disc. Insert the disc and then restart the computer. When asked to “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD”, go ahead and press any key.
2. Click Next until you get to the screen that has the option “Repair your computer”, select the operating system you want to repair and then click Next.








N.B. Before reaching this screen, you may have to set preferences for the language to install, time and currency format, and the keyboard or input method.
3. In the System Recovery Options dialog, choose System Restore from the list and then click Next.
4. Now you need to choose the system restore from the list. You want to choose a restore point that will return the computer to a state where the logon was successful and that was using the old password.
5. Then click Next to confirm the disks, then Finish to confirm the restore point and finally Yes in the warning window to begin the restore.
6. Important Note: After you use the System Restore feature, you have to reinstall any programs or updates that were done on the system after that restore point. You will not lose any personal documents; however, you may have to reinstall programs. You might also have to reset some personal settings.
7. When the restore is complete, click on Restart to restart the computer. Click Close to confirm that the restore was successful.
8. You can now try to logon using the older password (in the case where you had reset a password on an user account and then forgot it) or using the normal password (in the case where the account was deleted by accident).
9. If you have simply forgotten your password or cleared the restore point, then this method will not work.

Trick 2 : Using NT password and Registry Editor
You need to burn a disk with a special utility called an Offline NT Password and Registry Editor. Here is a link: http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/
To use this:
1. Get the machine to boot from CD (or floppy)
2. Floppy version need to swap floppy to load drivers.
3. Load drivers (usually automatic, but possible to run manual select)
4. Disk select; tell which disk contains the Windows system. Optionally you will have to load drivers.
5. PATH select, where on the disk is the system?
6. File select, which parts of registry to load, based on what you want to do.
7. Password reset or other registry edit.
8. Write back to disk (you will be asked)
N.B. The most common problem is that the computer was not cleanly shut down, and the disk won’t write correctly back. (it says: read only file system). If so, boot into Windows Safe Mode (F8 before windows logo appears) and shut down from the login window. You may have to do that twice in a row.

Trick 3: ophcrack live cd method
You have to download a CD image from here for this
http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/
1. Click the button corresponding to the operating system of the computer you’ll be recovering the password on.
2. If you’ve forgotten the password on a Windows XP computer, click on ophcrack XP LiveCD. If you’ve forgotten the password on a Windows Vista computer, click on ophcrack Vista LiveCD.
3. Burn the image into a cd.
4. Insert the Ophcrack Live CD disc into your CD/DVD drive and restart your computer.
5. The initial screen you see after restarting should be the same one you always see immediately after starting your computer. There may be computer information like in this screenshot or there may be a computer manufacturer logo.
6. You don’t need to do anything here. Ophcrack LiveCD will continue automatically after the Automatic boot in x seconds… timer at the bottom of the screen expires. If you’d like to advance the process a little faster, feel free to hit Enter while Ophcrack Graphic mode is highlighted.
7. The next step in the Ophcrack LiveCD boot process is this little window that appears on screen. It may appear and disappear very quickly so you could miss it, but I wanted to point it out because it will be a window that runs in the background that you may see.
8. This message is simply confirming that a partition with encrypted password information on it has been found on your hard drive.
9. The next screen is the Ophcrack LiveCD software itself. Ophcrack will attempt to recover the passwords for all of the user accounts that it can find on your computer. This password cracking process is completely automated.
10. As you can see in the example above, the passwords for the Administrator and Guest accounts are listed as empty. If you were cracking a password for a user that Ophcrack shows as empty, you now know that you can log on to the account without a password at all.
11. Look at the bottom of the list - see the Stacy user account? In under one minute, Ophcrack recovered the password to this account - applesauce. You can ignore any other accounts you’re not interested in recovering the passwords for.

12. After Ophcrack recovers your password, write it down, remove the Ophcrack LiveCD disc from your optical drive and restart your computer. You don’t need to exit the Ophcrack software - it won’t harm your computer to power it off or restart it while it’s running.

N.B. Remember it can only recover password which are up to 14 characters long and do not have any special character (Like @,# etc.) in it.
Trick 4: Only applicable in some pirated versions
1. Just enter through safe mode with command prompt by pressing F8 key and
2. Now type net user username new password and press enter
3. Eg. net user ravi year2009
4. This will set your password for user account ravi to year2009.
5. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: All information provided in this post is for discussion purpose only. Author is not responsible in case of illegal use, failure or lose of information or data.