How to Reset a Windows XP Password

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Michael Burton, executive producer for Real Entertainment located in Atlanta, Georgia. We offer full service video production for any project. Now I want to talk to you about how to reset a Windows XP password. First of all let me start off by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am not affiliated with Microsoft. To reset a Windows XP password is actually pretty simple. There's a couple different ways you can do this depending on what it is that you're trying to accomplish. Now to just in general reset a Windows XP password it's fairly simple. You just go to the start menu, you're going to pull up your control panel, you're going to go over to your user accounts. You're going to pull up which user account you wish to change the password for and that'll give you an option here to create password. Now if you already have a password it'll either say change your password or you can go back to create a password again and just type in a new password and type in your old password and it will create your new password. Now if you're trying just to erase the password completely just type in your old password and for a new password don't enter anything and click create password and it will create your new password. Now if for some reason you have purchased a new computer and you are trying to reset the password because you cannot get onto, well not a new computer but you purchased a friends, like an existing computer, used computer, and you can't get onto that computer because of an existing password, there is a way to combat this. You are going to need the use of a second computer because obviously if you can't get on your computer you can't get onto the Internet. So you're going to have to use a second computer for this but it's fairly simple. You're going to look for an emergency recovery disk web site. There's many programs out there. Many recovery disks. And the most popular one is Winternals Emergency Recovery Disk with locksmith and what you do is you go to their web site, you download the software or you download the program, you burn it to a CDrom. Then you take that CDrom and you boot from the CDrom on your new computer that you want to change the password on and then follow the on screen instructions and it'll walk you through the process of unlocking and resetting that password so that you can get onto that computer."