I recently helped a friend with a laptop that had a forgotten password and had been locked out. I learned a new way of bypassing the basic Windows login with little effort.
One caveat to this “hack” is it only works for local user accounts. That is to say, accounts that are not linked or set up by Microsoft when you installed Windows. However, if a Microsoft account is locked out, they provide an option to reset the password via email.
I followed this fairly straightforward tutorial by WindowsClub. It uses a Windows install disk to access the command prompt (the built Windows recovery tools lock the terminal behind a login screen), switch the command prompt directory to the installed Windows sys32, and rename cmd.exe to the accessibility button exe, called utilman.exe. This tricks Windows into thinking the command prompt is an accessibility application that a logged-out user can use.
Then, you can enter Net user <username> <password>2 the username is the account you want to change, and the password is the new password being set.
After changing the password, I was able to log in. I removed the command prompt from the log-in screen by renaming the accessibility menu to its original name.
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