Password Reset for user accounts in Windows Vista

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Have been inactive for blogging quite sometime, and I really wanted to share this out few weeks ago, however the bloggin mood is not there yet. Finally is here today... :P

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Have you ever stucked on the Ctrl Alt Del screen and trying hard to figure out what is the password for your account? There are many people in this world who forgets their password for their own computer (wheter accidentally or on purpose) especially the administrator password which they don't even know when and why they should use it. If you've been to this situation, you know how pain it is for the process of cracking the password setup by yourself. In fact there are bunch of tools in the internet which teaches you on how to break into your own system with their smart tools. However often enough these tools comes with a price. Fortunately Microsoft is getting "smarter" as they introduced a great tools which automatically comes with every Windows Vista (with or without SP1), Server 2008 (with or without R2) or even Seven (at least in RTM) - The "Ease of Access" button. In my opinion, this time they really meant it - hard. Why? Read this to refresh your memory.


Now there is another way which is even much more simple as to achieve this, no administrator account/password required, no ownership hassle, no UAC, and straightforward in the process of backdoor creation. The magic lies in the Windows Installation DVD itself. (WinPE is an alternative) Before that, please ensures that your computer are capable to boot from your DVD drive (just to be sure :P) and is set to boot from DVD rom. Steps below might be vary if you booting from WinPE.

1. Place the DVD into your optical drive.

2. Boot into the DVD by Press any key when you've been told.


3. Wait and wait for the DVD to be booted.


4. Then it reaches the installation screen. Click "Next" even though you have the Windows installed N years ago.


5. Select the last option which is "Repair your computer".


6. Choose the first option when System Recovery Options where prompted.


7. Choose "Command Prompt" from list of options available.


8. There you get your beloved command prompt with full administrator privilege. Navigate to your system32 folder. Alright, you might be asking why not I throw in directly "Compmgmt.msc" here and reset the password. In fact, I've tried that. However the MMC just refuse to be started. Hence, move on.....


9. Using the same target "Magnify.exe", make a backup of the original copy beforehand (in case on one day you start to regret of having the door open at all times, you can easily revert back). To do this, simply rename the original "Magnify.exe" to "Magnify.bak". - ren Magnify.exe Magnify.bak


10. Make another copy of command prompt and name it as "Magnify.exe" so that it takes the roles on the original "Magnify.exe". - copy cmd.exe Magnify.bak


11. Do a final checking, ok it's there. Shut off everything you can see and reboot your computer.


12. This time, just boot into your windows straight.


13. When your computer are ready, click on the "Ease of Access" button and says "Hell yea, I am accessing this computer with ease".


14. Enable the magnify option, and click OK. Walla... the powerful command prompt is there.



15. Till this steps, I'm sure most of you know what to do next. For those who still have no idea what to do next, here is the magic begin. Open up the Computer Management console via command prompt. - compmgmt.msc


16. Just follow back the password reset routine, expand the tree on the left, expand "Local Users and Groups", click on "Users", select the user you want to hack have the password reset, right click on it and select "Set Password".


17. Click "Proceed" if prompted, and proceed to reset the password.


18. Click on "Ok" and you're done.


Disclaimers : Try at your own risk and I held no responsibility on any damage you bring upon yourself. Good for solving your "forget password issue" and bad for the rest. Thanks.

Configure Shadow Copy size for Windows Vista

Wonder why the Windows Vista system taking so much of space in your system drive? Well there are many things which can easily take up your precious space in your hard drive. Windows Vista new features, Vista search and also the backup mechanism so called System Resotre, and Shadow Copies are the main culprit in such issues.

Well we can choose to limit which folder or drive to have the Vista search features so that it minimize the indexing size, and we can also turn off System Restore easily if you don't really play with new drivers or applications everyday. Hence in my opinion it's extremely safe even without the System Restore. Shadow Copies is a very good and cool features which provided by Windows Vista. Imaging one day, you accidentally deletes a file or edited a file which you don't intended to, Shadow Copy can easily restore the files back in just a blink.

However, Shadow Copies actually occupied very large of hard disk space. In my scenario, I have a 40GB hard disk parition for Windows Vista alone, and Windows Vista "intelligently" reserve 15% of my hard disk space for this purpose. In another words, it's whopping 6GB of space.

Right click on my C:\ drive and navigate to properties, proceed to Previous Version tab, you can see that there is a long list of C:\ drive being "Shadow Copied". Initially I thought of deleting the old Shadow which I think I won't be needing it. However I realised that it doesn't not even have an option to do that.

Well... not to say that it donesn't have any option at all. Windows Vista actually do comes with a very good tools to configure the resize the amount of space that reserved Shadow Copy. This tools is called as VSSAdmin. Fire up this tools via command prompt under administrative privileges, and type vssadmin.

VSSAdmin

To see how much space that Windows Vista actually allocated for the Shadow Copies, key in "vssadmin list shadowstorage" in the command prompt.


You can actually resize the amount of space allocated for Shadow Copies via vssadmin too. For example now, I want to resize my shadow copies size to only 3GB instead of 6GB, just key in "vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on=C: /maxsize=3GB" and immediately the older Shadow Copy will be deleted and release quite an amount of hard disk space.

Shrinked to 3GB

Before shrink



After shrink



Hope that this tips can help you too. :)

Boring weekend

Well it is a boring Saturday, and there is no plans in my mind on what should I do. Wake up at 10am in the morning, finished up few episode of HK drama, and went out for lunch after awhile. After back from lunch, again jump into the boring mode. Looking at my dusty table fan, I decides to give the fan a good bath. See the pictures below and you'll know how dusty it is. :P




And finally it regains it's clean look.


After cleaning the fan, tidy up my bedroom, cleans my toilet, and also my computer mouse, it was already 4pm. Resumes my HK drama, and waiting for my dinner after that. That's it for the whole day. In the end, my housemates and I sat down together and plan for tomorrow, Sunday programme. We decides for a one day trip to Melaka. :P

Goodbye 932B-Plus, and Welcome T220

Yesterday my dad told me that his monitor at home was broke down so without hesitation, I offered my 1year old Samsung 932B Plus to my dad. This morning I went to Lowyat Plaza and my target was 22" Samsung monitor. As I went into the Samsung showroom, Samsung T220 draws my attention to it. The design was nice and it comes with specially designed touch-sensitive power button. However it was in dark rose color, which doesn't gain much of my interest. Just when I plan to gave up, I saw a blue color T220 in the catalogue, so I asked for the salesgirl if they have any blue color unit of T220. Too bad she told that it was out of stock and they have no idea when would it be restocked. Without giving up my hope, I walk around Lowyat and finally saw that Thundermatch in Level4 has few units left. Happily I bought this new baby home. :)

My old 932B+

Unbox my T220 Blue

Stupid.. Why they provide me this kind of power cord.. Where and How am I suppose to plug this? Waste my RM10 to buy a new standard power cord.

Contrast ratio was amazingly high (Although is only dynamic) 20000:1

Touch-sensitve power button. I found it difficult to switch it On when my room are dark as it lacks of physical button.

This is how it normally looks like. (When there is no direct light applied)

It glows when there is a light shine on it.

My new screen and my new wallpaper :)

Leopard in to a Non-Apple Computer? - Part3

Having only one hard disk detected in my mac was somehow irritating as I need to move out some of my favourite files from the "missing" hard disk to the "visible" hard disk in Windows before I could access it from my Mac. I've been figuring on this for around 2 days and I've done enough google'ing yet I found no solutions on this yet. However on the 3rd days, I found out a clue when I take a look on my Hardware Properties in my Windows Vista. This is the possible culprit :
Hard disk 1 - Location 0 (Channel 0, Target 0, Lun 0) and
Hard disk 2 - Location 0 (Channel 0, Target 0, Lun 0) too while
Optical Drive - Location 0 (Channel 1, Target 0, Lun 0).


Hence obviously there is some problem with the channel as it was not suppose to have 2 drive plugged in the same channel. By taking out my computer's casing and take a look on my mainboard, it has 3 pairs of SATA interface where 2 pairs are powered by Intel ACHI8, and a pair of Gigabyte own interface. By plugging only one device to each pair of the SATA interface, it corrects up the Channel listing. Reboot the computer and logged onto my Mac, yes... it shows up both of my hard disk and also optical drive living happily with each other.


Hard disk issue solved, however LAN interface was not running as expected. Did a google and it was solved by following this guide here.

After the LAN was up and running, WiFi is the next item on the list. This really makes me smack my head as I was pairing up hardwares to make sure that it was able to run in Mac, however I forgot to choose a Mac compatible WiFi adapter. I got a Prolink WG2000R WiFi adapter which I have no idea what chipset it was using, so the only thing I can do is guess. After a few guessing which makes me almost gave up and settle down with cables, the RaLink driver works like charm. I followed the guide in the InsanelyMac forum which explains on how to makes RaLink WiFi adapter works proerply in Mac and now I got the WiFi works in my Mac.


Problems solved. This is my Mac screen caps.. :)