Retrieving Files from Another Userid

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My wife telecommutes from home. She changed her password on her PC. This morning she realized she does not know her new password. I don’t think there’s a way to get it. She has another userid so she can login using that one to do her work until she can figure out what happened.

My question is this, is there a way to retrieve files that are in her old userid? Specifically she has a lot of macros she uses in her normal.dot file and she needs her favorites from her firefox browser that she uses for research. How can I retrieve those files from her old userid?

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What OS is she running ???

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Sorry Doc, I should have stated the OS. She is running Windows 2000 Professional.

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Do you have the password for an account with Administrator privileges? If so then you can simply change the password for this user to something that you know – but note that this would prevent access to any files that have been encrypted with Microsoft’s Encrypted File System (EFS).

StuartR

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Thanks Stuart. I’ll check tonight to see if her secondary userid has administrative privileges. If it does that will solve the problem. I don’t think she is using EFS. However, if it does not have adminsitrative privileges, is there another approach?

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> However, if it does not have adminsitrative privileges, is there another approach?

You can use a tool like this one to change a password, either for the user account or for an administrator account. I have used this tool successfully on a number of occasions.

StuartR

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Thanks Stuart and Bob. If her secondary userid is not administrator then I’ll give these a shot. Thank you very much.

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In older OSes often the builtin admin account named Administrator is left active. Sometimes it does not even have a password.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks Joe. I’ll check the Administrator userid tonight when I get home.

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Update……. When I finally got home my wife figured out which key she accidentally pressed when she entered in her new password. Now she has the correct password. I also found out that both her userids have administrator rights in case it happens again. Thanks again for the help.

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Glad she figured out the password. Thanks for posting back.

Joe

--Joe

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There seem to be a lot of utilities that claim to be able to retreive passwords, like:

PASSWORD

I haven’t tried any of them but if you Google “retreive password”, you get a lot of hits, some free, some for a few dollars.

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