How to Reset Windows Password Without an Install CD

If you’ve forgotten your Windows password and you don’t have an install CD laying around, there’s no need to worry. Not only are there half a dozen complicated ways to reset the password, you can do it easily with the Offline Windows Password editor.

Of course, if you do have a Windows CD, you can reset your password the easy way with a simple trick.

Note: this should work on all versions of Windows, but if you are running Windows 8 or 8.1 andalso using a Microsoft Account to login to your computer, you’ll need to reset your Microsoft Account password using a web browser on their web site.

Create the Boot Disk.

You will need to create a boot disk using another PC. First, you’ll need to download the boot disk from here:

Download the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

Then download and launch ImgBurn, which is a really simple piece of software that helps you burn an ISO image to a disk.

 Note: if you have some other application for burning an ISO image, you can use that instead.

Choose the Source, click the burn button, and create the boot disk.

You could also create a bootable USB drive instead if you’d like, the instructions are on the Offline NT download site.

Resetting Your Windows Password.

Boot your PC from the boot disk (you might have to adjust the BIOS to allow booting from the CD). You’ll be prompted at a couple of screens, which you can generally just hit the Enter key at. For

Steps to Create a Self Signed Security (SSL) Certificate and Deploy it to Client Machines.

Developers and IT administrators have, no doubt, the need the deploy some website throughHTTPS using an SSL certificate. While this process is pretty straightforward for a production site, for the purposes of development and testing you may find the need to use an SSL certificate here as well.

As an alternate to purchasing and renewing a yearly certificate, you can leverage your WindowsServer’s ability to generate a self signed certificate which is convenient, easy and should meet these types of needs perfectly.

Creating a Self Signed Certificate on IIS

While there are several ways to accomplish the task of creating a self signed certificate, we will use the SelfSSL utility from Microsoft. Unfortunately, this doesn’t ship with IIS but it is freely available as part of the IIS 6.0 Resource Toolkit (link provided at the bottom of this article). Despite the name “IIS 6.0″ this utility works just fine in IIS 7.

All that is required is to extract the IIS6RT to get the selfssl.exe utility. From here you can copy it to your Windows directory or a network path/USB drive for future use on another machine (so you don’t have to download and extract the full IIS6RT).

Once you have the SelfSSL utility in place, run the following command (as the Administrator) replacing the values in <> as appropriate:

selfssl /N:CN=<your.domain.com> /V:<number of valid days>

The example below produces a self signed wildcard certificate against “mydomain.com” and sets it to be valid for 9,999 days. Additionally, by answering yes to the prompt, this certificate is automatically configured to bind to port 443 inside the Default Web Site of IIS.

While at this point the certificate is ready to use, it is stored only in the personal certificate store on the server. It is a best practice to also have this certificate set in the trusted root as well.

Import a Trusted Root Certification Authority In Windows 7/Vista/XP.

1. Start Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Tool

Click Start -> Run -> Enter 'MMC' and click 'OK'

 2. Click File -> Add/Remove Snap-In...

3. Add Certificate.

Select 'Certificates' in left panel and click 'Add' to move to right panel , Then Click 'OK'

4. Select 'Computer Account' option and click 'Next'