What can you do if you forgot your Windows admin password?

You can upgrade to w-7 from XP with a clean install, and upgrade from 7 to 8, but you can never downgrade from any version of 8 like in the pre w7 days.

Of course you can if you have a windows 7 CD......I downgraded from windows 8.1 to windows 7 and did not have a single glitch.

Too bad Win7 and 8 disable the Hidden Administrator by default, although I'm not sure what service pack did this, because in Vista it came long after Win7 was on sale. You could boot to safe mode and click in the hidden administrator there, and voila! You have control again. Good luck getting this down though. Other advice here is probably more pertinent. I use my old Knoppix Linux disk to change passwords, but so many computers no longer use optical drives, that doesn't count anymore either. Besides the fact that Win7 begins with a different version of filing system called NT6, so my old methods may no longer work.

Be careful when you say "downgrade". first of all, in most cases, Windows 8 does not include downgrade rights as part of its license. You can only "downgrade" Windows 8 Professional, and ONLY if the Professional version came with the machine when brand new. You can't downgrade Windows 8 "home" to Windows 7. Also, if you add Windows Pro as an upgrade, you can't downgrade it to Windows 7. The Pro version has to come with the PC when new.

Now, that being said, of course, if you own a legal copy of Windows 7, or buy one, you're certainly free to install it, a fresh install with its own new license, not a "downgrade".

Last, you should be careful. Very often, new Windows 8 PCs aren't compatible with Windows 7; no drivers are available, etc. Even if your Windows 8 Pro license allows the downgrade, that doesn't mean it will actually work. If you want to downgrade, check very carefully to see that the model you buy will be compatible with the downgrade. Check for driver availability, forum discussions, etc. The manufacturer's website and Google are your friends.

when I forgot my Sony VAIO Windows 8 admin password, I downloaded Windows Password Recovery Tool Ultimate 4.1 from http://download.cnet.com/Windows-Password-Recovery-Tool-Ultimate/3000-2092_4-10964595.html to unlock laptop by creating a password reset disk efficiently!
Hope it helps more users!

Petter Nordahl-Hagen's CD save my life numerous times.
This is a solid, rustic solution that works 100% of the times and I like it for that...

I second and third and fourth his reply. I have been using this utility, on a bootable CD for years, it has never let me down. People say the MS tech are uninformed, totally the opposite, they are instructed to tell people you must reformat your disk, as MS doesn't want people to know you can get at your password. Being able to edit the registry offline is a plus, also.

I can do that. Where it says user name, type in administrator, in the blank where it asks for Your password, enter the word password. I know it worked with xp

It only worked on XP if the person who installed XP on the computer used the word, password, as the administrator password.

You could hit Ctrl-Alt-Del twice at the welcome screen to enable the hidden administrator logon. Then simply click through and avoid entering a password at all. But this will only work if your lucky and the hidden account has not been disabled by a service pack. Out of desperation and to save, time I ALWAYS try it! Many times this solves the problem in the git-go, because the installation CD does not disable the hidden account by default. I'm pretty sure this works on pre SP1 versions of Win7.

Has saved me aggravation many times.

make sure your free password recovery program works for NT6 - if you con't know what that means, it won't matter if the recovery software says it works with Win7 and 8/8.1

4Denise has a good point. You might have had Caps Lock on when you first typed your password. Try turning it on and typing in the password you wrote down. There's a good chance it will work.

I love this option. It's frightening how easy it is to use the Linux bootable option to recover a password.

confusing as hell for my Joe and Jill Sixpacks! I'm not criticizing them, it is just that they don't think in PC organization ways of logic. They might be geniuses at other things!

Yes, it's easy to reset the password with a bootable disk. However, to do that, whoever's doing it has to have physical access to your computer. If they have physical access, they can pull the hard drive out, plug it into another computer, and get your files anyway.

What OS is Wind?

Just a long shot guess - Windows. Never type more than you actually need to type.

I remember a LONG time ago telling everyone, friends just don't let friends do AOL!!! But to be honest, my brother has been using it for years, because his family likes it. He hasn't had a problem one. I think he must have a guardian angle, because NONE of my clients could avoid unmitigated disaster with it!!!

I used to use the AOL program to access AOL and nothing else. It worked fine. Somewhere along the line, AOL started trying to incorporate too much, so I gave the e-mail browser access version a shot and liked it. Organization is better than any of the competition, and so is security -- although not perfect, which I haven't seen from any e-mail provider yet.

While I have a number of email addresses, I still have an old AOL email address that I sometimes use. Too much trouble to abandon it, but I too have stopped using AOL's intrusive program. Their web-only access works quite well.

I have noticed one thing, though. For all the bad things you could say about AOL (and there are many), I will say one good thing about it. For years now, I have never, ever, received even a single spam email that actually originated on an AOL mail server. Sure, sometimes someone fakes an AOL return address, but never from an email that actually originated on AOL itself. I sometimes wonder, let's pretend that AOL was sooo successful, that the entire internet was run by AOL (sort of like "ALL restaurants are Taco Bell" in the movie, "Demolition Man" ). If such a single-provider system were to evolve, would there be no more spam?

Too funny!

Go here and watch video, hope it helps......https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlDMfJqZDxM