We have a windows 2000 machine and are trying to do updates - requires the admin password. The employee that set it up is no longer here and cannot remember the password anyway. Is there a way to recover or reset this? Karen Fegarty MailWorkZ

I got a good idea which should fix it in a couple of minutes. Download Austrumi; a linux bootable ISO. It sounds strange, but it really works. Download the program here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/austrumi/austrumi-0.9.7.iso?download Burn it on a CD, make sure it is an ISO, so you can boot it on startup. Once you are in the program typ: nt_pass and it will give you a menu of the different acounts active on the computer. Just follow the instructions on the screen and the password will be erased. Make sure to use * for a new password, which means no password, and then change the password to your own preference in windows itself. Boot the computer and voila! you're in

As this is a company PC and presumably you many W2K or XP)PCs... install the drive in another (W2K/XP) PC as a slave; access the SAM file and delete it. Return drive to its home PC and reboot. All things being equal you will come up with a fresh Admin log-on box; pick your Admin password (or leave blank?) and you're in; recreate any user accounts required for/on this PC. (If there's a SAM backup you may have to delete that too; sometimes folks report that file "appears" to recreate the original SAM, or otherwise still produce the lock-out situation - and thus you're back to square one. Personally I've not had that happen for me.) If by chance (and I doubt it's the case...) W2K = fat32, then simply boot with a '98 bootdisk; locate/delete the SAM file; reboot etc. as above. SAM is in: winnt\system32\config Otherwise: http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm lists many of the "other legal" approaches.. Or buy the Knoppix CD (linux on a CD). If in N.America then O'Reilly has a Knoppix hacking guide - actually it's the latest Knoppix CD with an excellent detailed manual on how to run/use linux (from a CD) on any system; logically it includes accessing password files... It also allows one to get familiar with Linux without installing it; and it can be installed too. The book is around $30. The Knoppix CD alone is typically around £10/$17 - or as with the other similar util can be downloaded from the wwww etc.