Did you forget the computer password and couldn’t log in? It’s happened to the best of us. In fact, I once had a friend set a password on my laptop as a joke when my laptop was left unattended during a trip to the restroom. He forgot the password he used and left me locked out of my computer for the night.

So what do you do if this happens to you? Well, I have bad news for you. Unfortunately, you’ll have to format the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. All data on your system drive will be lost and you may also lose your genuine copy of Windows or Office. In this tutorial we’ll show you an easy way to reset computer password when you forgot it, all without reinstalling the operating system.

How to Reset Computer Password After Forgetting It?

To get started, we need to prepare a blank CD or USB drive, and use a second computer to burn the disc. Next, take the CD/USB drive to boot off your locked computer and perform password resetting. Reset Windows Password is the password cracking software we used during the following steps.

Step 1:
First, download the Reset Windows Password utility on another PC in order to make a bootable Windows password recovery CD/USB drive. After the download is complete, extract the ISO image file from the zip and burn the ISO to a CD or DVD using your favorite CD Burning utility such as ISO2Disc.

Step 2:
Now move to the locked computer you want to reset the password, either insert the CD/DVD or the USB flash drive what you opted for and select it as the first boot device in computer BIOS.

Step 3:
Once you have booted into it you will see that the computer is loading the Windows PE operating system inside the CD/USB drive. After one or two minutes, the Reset Windows Password program will open up and automatically detect the SAM registry files for all your Windows installations.

Step 4:
Choose the SAM registry file for your Windows installation, it will show you all the user accounts that are associated with your Windows system. Select the user account you forgot password of, and then click on “Reset Password” button. It will remove/reset your forgotten computer password instantly!

Step 5:
After you are completed with all the above steps successfully, remove the Windows password recovery CD/USB drive and restart the computer. you can then happily log back into your computer without issue.

Conclusion

Forgot the login password on your computer? Simply follow these steps and you can reset computer password on all versions of Windows. Quickly regain access to your system in case your computer password is lost or forgotten.