A Smartass Education

So you want way more power over your windows machine than you probably should have:

As a smartass and a computer guy I like to know all sorts of sneaky ways to get things done. So when I find out about a quick way to get more power over a windows system in only a min or two, I listen, test and then share. Now I can think of many reasons why you would want to have system access to a machine, but in this tutorial lets just say you forget the passwords to all your administrator accounts. Don’t laugh, I have met countless people who have done so back when I was fixing computers for a living. In this case you have 3 options:

1) Download a linux based NTFS password changer and burn to cd. This works well however the terminology will probably confuse people since it’s all about finding and editing the Hive of a SAM file.
2) Call a local computer company to fix. Doing this they will probably just do step 1 if they know what they are doing, if they don’t they will try to login to Administrator in safe mode and in failing to do so will convince you that they need to erase you computer.
3) Turn your non-admin account or guest account into a hardcore system account and simply change the password.

We will follow choice 3. It’s super easy and I have tested it myself. In my usual fashion I will keep this short without a lot of excess text, because then if you understand it, it’s short enough to remember without having to reference back!

1) Start > Run > cmd.exe > type: at 12:03 /interactive “cmd.exe” (replace 12:03 with a time 2 mins from now). > close command prompt
2) New command prompt will open, when it does > Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL > find explorer.exe and End Process.
3) At command prompt type: cd.. > type: explorer.exe

If you have never done this before it may take a few seconds to create a new profile, but then you will see the user System in the start menu as user name.

Be warned, this account is scary powerful, this is basically root on a windows machine. So try not to delete any important system files etc..