Blank Adminstrator password - TechRepublic
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August 9, 2007 at 01:45 PM
bbusk

Blank Adminstrator password

by bbusk . Updated 18 years, 11 months ago

Any time I got a new computer or installed or reformatted a hard drive that required installing the OS (Windows 95, 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP Home, XP Pro) I always left the administrators password blank and the OS aceepted that and when I turned on my computer or rebooted I never had to enter a password because there wasn’t one. I recently got a message on my Dell OPtiplex 745, shipped to me by my employer (I work at home) that my password would expire in 2 days. I went to the control panel and checked the “password never expires box. The next time I rebooted the machine, I was asked for a password. I didn’t evere enter one so I just pressed enter and the computer told me “wrong password”. Did Microsoft make a change that won’t allow blanks? I finally discovered a “hole” in the system that allow me access to User Accounts in the Control Panel where I could enter a password. It also required me to have 3 of 4 types of characters in the password. The four were upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters. I have procedure to change forgotton Administrator passwords that requires an XP pro installation disk. It worked and only a few things were changed when I got it up and running. Why can’t you have a blank admin password? I think, if you create another account on the computer, blanks are allowed.

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