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  • How to bypass login password on Vista

Dear Fellow geeks,

I seek your help in a very sad yet urgent matter.

A family member has passed away, leaving us the laptop containing all of her photos, problem is that the laptop is locked with a password.
operating system is : windows vista home premium.

is there any way to gain access bypassing the password without formatting?

thank you.
Kamalkh, use this: http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

It let's you remove the windows password our edit it.I recommend you remove it because its resort to do so with this software. If you cannot remove the password following the software instructions or the small online guide, then by all means ask for instructions.

My condolences.

Edit: j4d seems to have submitted his post before mine. I have already used the software I linked to and it is also good and easy to use.
I have encountered people who also had the same problem.
What I use is Hiren's BootCD 15.1. It's a Live CD which can boot to Linux and Windows XP. It also has TONS of utilities to test a system or to recover data. It also has Ophcrack and other tools to change windows passwords.
Good luck and I'm sorry for your loss.
The best way to remove the pass is to use the utility tool "chntpw", already available on Backtrack, live image or you can install it on any other Linux Distro.
Google a bit, you'll find complete tutorials i guess.

@Jad: Using OphCrack will crack the password usng rainbow tables, well it might take some time and there's a possibility that it may not be able to crack it, also you need to download the tables.

Chntpw is a small tool around 4 mb, you'll remove the pass in no time.
4 days later
Sorry for your loss. To change vista's password use ERD Commander for vista it will help you alot (note: in erd commander their is something called "Smith Lock" press it then type the password you want after that restart and type the new pass that you entered earlier and voila you're in :) ) hope I manged to help :)
3 months later
Use a software called KonBoot.
No need to download all those 500 MB CD rips just to bypass a password.
This is only a 3 MB file, that can enter widows with bypassing the password.
Though i dont think it can change it or remove it.
But you can do that after you enter windows using it, i have tried it, and it works just fine.
It can be used on a CD, USB and a floppy drive.

Here is a torrent download of the software.
im sorry for your loss, a bootable disc is the best option here, unless she doesn't have passwords saved on browsers, go with booting into windows vista...im sure she wouldn't have wanted someone to snoop into her online accounts,i wouldn't either
You can also go into safe mode and just delete the password.