Seattle Tech Talk Blog

Earlier I posted on how to reset the password for Windows XP, but what if you just want to know the password? There is one program that can crack the windows password without even logging into the operating system. “Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman’s original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds. ”

I’ve tried this CD myself and it works like a charm. First you must download the Ophcrack ISO here. After you download it, burn the ISO to a CD using any program that can do so. After you burned it to a CD, boot to the CD and follow any onscreen steps if any should arise. After that a window will open up on the Linux OS. Lets the computer figure out the password and you’re done. The CD cannot crack passwords with special characters like !@#$%^&*() and it can only crack passwords that are shorter than 14 characters.