lost password for XP home

Around 9/28/06 Bekah asked:

Best Buy wanted to charge me $200 for recovering my lost password to login to XP home. Is there an easy way to fix this?

Hi Bekah,

The situation: Windows XP Home does not let you log in with the Administrator account normally. That’s good. To access it so that we can use it to change your regular user password, you must restart the computer in safe mode, a special ‘minimal’mode used to correct errors caused by third-party software, among other things. Sounds fun, no?
Here are the instructions:
1. Turn on the computer.
2. Immediately after the POST screen, or the first black screen, or whatever, press F8 a few times to bring up the XP advanced options menu.
3. Select the “Start Windows XP in safe mode” option. Hit enter.
4. If you are prompted to select the operating system to start, select Microsoft Windows XP Home and then press ENTER.
5. Once safe mode has loaded, on the “To begin, click your user name” screen, click Administrator. The password is blank by default in XP Home, we hope…
6. If that worked, then click Yes to acknowledge that Windows is running in safe mode.
7. Click Start, and then click Control Panel (or point to Settings, and then click Control Panel).
8. Click User Accounts.
9. Click the user account whose password you want to change.
10. Click “Change the Password”
11. Type the new password for the user, and then click Change Password.
12. Quit the User Accounts tool.
13. Reboot the computer normally (use Start Menu:Shut Down:Restart).

I hope this works!

I’m having deja vu right now really bad because I feel like I’ve emailed this exact info out before… I even put “I hope this works” at the end of emails just like this before. Fun.

Peace,
-Brian