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Why hack Windows passwords when you can simply create yourself a new Administrator account?

In a previous post I showed how you can use an Ophcrack Live CD to crack Windows passwords in minutes. It works, I’ve done it before and it really works. The free, open source Ophcrack Live CD is a Windows account password cracking tool designed to help you recover lost Windows passwords. Quite a few people have sent me emails or chatted me via my website saying “I forgot my password”, or “my kid locked himself out of his pc”. I’m unsure if that’s really the case or if they were just looking for a way to crack Windows passwords. However, if that is really the case there is potentially a much faster way to resolve your issue… just create a new Administrator account!

To create a new Administrator account you’ll want to grab a copy of the Offensive Security’s BackTrack Live CD which can be found here.

What is BackTrack?

BackTrack is the result of the merging of two Innovative Penetration Testing live Linux distributions - Whax and Auditor. BackTrack has been dubbed as the best Security Live CD today, and has been rated 1st in its category, and 32nd overall in Insecure.org. Based on SLAX (Slackware), BackTrack provides user modularity. This means the distribution can be easily customised by the user to include personal scripts, additional tools, customized kernels, etc.

BackTrack Terminal Window

Here’s a quick and dirty way to make a new user account.

Boot into Backtrack and open a shell prompt:

• cd /mnt (change directory to mounted drives)

• ls (get the list of mounted drives)

• cd sda1 (sda1 is the main hard drive)

• cd Windows/ (change to the windows directory)

• cd System32/ (change to the system directory)

• mv Utilman.exe Utilman.old (backup original file)

• cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe (copy cmd.exe as utilman.exe)

• reboot

Once rebooted, at vista logon screen do the following:

• Press Windows key + U

• To invoke Utility Manager ( A.K.A. CMD.exe)

• Cmd.exe will spawn with ‘System’ privileges.

• c:\>net user S00perAdmin mypassword /add

• c:\>net localgroup administrators S00perAdmin /add

• Reboot and log in with your newly added Admin account

There ya go… now instead of needing to “crack” you “lost” password you can simply create a new Administrator account, login with that and then change the lost accounts password to what you want it to be.

I’ve been a long time customizer of the Windows interface. Windows XP always looked like it was designed by a team from Fischer Price (hey, it’s “My First PC!”). Vista is of course much better looking in the visual department but there are still tons of GUI customizations out there that many people prefer. If you want to change the way Windows looks, then get a copy of WindowBlinds by StarDock. A WindowBlinds skin can make Windows look like an alternative operating system, like their favorite sports or car brand, or something completely new. Because WindowBlinds uses the latest hardware acceleration features of modern video cards, WindowBlinds won’t slow down your computer and uses very little memory. (btw… StarDock’s entire suite, called Object Desktop is awesome).

If you’re using Vista with a WindowBlinds skin what’s lacking is customizing the Windows Vista SideBar. The Sidebar of course allows you to run those (sometimes) handy Gadgets on the side of your screen.

Enter Stanimir Stoyanov who has create a very useful application that automates customizing the appearance of the Windows Vista sidebar. If you change your skin and want your sidebar to match, Windows Sidebar Styler makes it very easy to change the look.

1. Visit Stanimir Stoyanov’s blog and download the latest version.
2. Once installed, start up the Windows Sidebar Styler. You can find it in the start menu under Stanimir Stoyanov.
3. You can replace individual graphics used to create a custom theme by scrolling through the Available Resource List, right clicking on a resource and selecting Replace.

   

   Alternatively, you open a theme that was already created by clicking on the open button that is just to the right of the big Apply/Play button.

   

4. Once you have your changes made or theme loaded, hit the big Apply/Play button and you are finished.

   

Looking for more Windows Sidebar Styler themes to download? Check out WinCustomize.

Direct from HowToGeek comes instructions on adding a simple registry tweak that will allow you to add “Defragment” to the context menu on any drive when you right click it.

After manually applying or downloading the hack, you’ll have a new item on the right-click menu for your drives…

Which will start up the command-line version of Disk Defragmenter (after accepting the UAC prompt)

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell

Create a new key under shell called “runas”, and then set the (Default) value to “Defragment”. If you want to hide this menu item behind the Shift key right-click menu, then add a new string called Extended with no value.

Next, you’ll need to create a key called “command” and set the default value to the following, which is the command to run defrag with the default options but show verbose output.

defrag %1 -v

You can alternately choose from one of the other defrag switches here if you’d like.

Downloadable Registry Hack

HowToGeek provides a downloadable registry hack to do all of this for you. Simply download, extract, and double-click on either AddDefragToDriveMenu.reg (for the regular menu) or AddDefragToExtendedDriveMenu.reg (to hide behind the Shift key). There’s also an included removal script that will remove either one.

This change is nothing new, the setting has existed since Windows 9x and likely most of you know how to activate it, but in case you don’t, here’s the quick and easy setting change.

With this change, just hover over an icon and you’ll see the underline:

And a single click will open up the folder.

Changing the Setting

Open up any folder, click on Organize and then Folder and Search options.

Then change the “Click items as follows” section to “Single-click” instead of “Double-click”.

You’ll notice the setting underneath it, which determines whether icon titles are underlined or not by default. The default setting is only when you point at them, so your icons will look normal:

If you change that setting to “Underline icon titles consistent with my browser”, you’ll see the titles on all items, all the time:

When you install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on your computer (or even if you install a copy of Vista that already has SP1 on it), the installer will not remove the older versions of Vista files from the hard drive. This is because the older files may be required in case you decide to uninstall SP1 later from the system.

SP1 added some needed tweaking and really helped stabilize Vista, why not reclaim some disk space by removing all the older Vista files?

There are no manual steps involved. Just open your Windows command prompt and type vsp1cln.exe (short for Vista SP1 Cleaner). It takes less than a minute to execute.

*vsp1cln.exe is added to your Windows Vista System folder after you install Vista SP1. The command window will display:

Would you like to continue? (Y/N): y

Performing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Disk Clean-up…

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Desk Clean-up completed.

This will make  Windows Vista Service Pack 1 permanent on this computer. All the older files are deleted now and your hard disk has tons of extra space for other important files like videos and photos.

You computer need not be connected to the Internet for running the Vista SP1 cleaner tool. And you won’t be able to remove Windows Vista Service Pack 1 later.

Windows Vista includes a feature, “Receive Window Auto-Tuning,” that you’ve likely never seen mentioned on your desktop, but which can cause noticeable drag and even crashing when browsing certain web sites or using some routers or other network hardware. If you’re noticing browsing glitches that only occur in Vista, the Wise Bread blog has a tip, pulled from PC Magazine’s recent issue, that explains how to turn off auto-tuning and skip the spinning blue circle of death.

To determine you current settings launch a command prompt as an Administrator (type “cmd” into the Start box, right-click on Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator), then enter the following line:

netsh interface tcp show global

If the line Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level does not say “disabled,” enter this command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted

If that doesn’t help the simplest way to turn off auto-tuning is to enter the following line:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disable

That should do it, and turning it off won’t likely have any adverse consequences. You should notice the difference in browsing speeds immediately. If you find otherwise, turn it back on with:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=normal

CyberNet offers a simple tweak for increasing the size of the Alt-Tab thumbnail previews in Vista:

One of Vista’s features that I use all of the time is the new Alt-Tab for switching between applications. Unlike Windows XP, Vista actually shows thumbnails for each application that you are running so that it is easier to identify what you’re looking for. And they just aren’t screenshots either like a lot of the imitators in XP, instead they show live previews of the application. Overall, it is just really nice.

The above is what the default Alt-Tab looks like in Windows Vista, and if you click on the image you’ll see the full-size version. That’s on a 1920×1200 screen, which makes it obvious that it doesn’t take up the whole width of the screen. Unfortunately Microsoft did not scale the width of the Alt-Tab based upon the size of the monitor.

If I’m running Vista on a monitor capable of 1920×1200, I want to utilize the space available. And as it stands, Alt-Tab shows 7 previews in a row before it creates a new row. I’d rather leave that number alone and have it make the thumbnails bigger when I have a larger resolution available.

That’s when I came across this site which gives some registry settings that you can modify to change the width of each thumbnail, and ultimately the size of the Alt-Tab display. To change the size just download this registry file, and after it is on your computer, right-click on it and select Merge. This will import it into your registry using the values I’ve specified in the file (optimized for displays that are 1680×1050).

The first thing you might want to do before Merging the file is to open it in Notepad (or any text editor) and adjust the MaxThumbSizePx to match something close to your resolution.

1024×768: MaxThumbSizePx = 00000078
1280×1024: MaxThumbSizePx = 0000009E
1680×1050: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000d2
1920×1200: MaxThumbSizePx = 000000f5

You do not need to restart your computer to see the changes, they should be instant. This is what the end result looks like on my 1920×1200 monitor (yeah, compare this to the screenshot above):

If you don’t like how it looks, and don’t want to mess around with it, you can always revert back to the old Vista Alt-Tab dimensions by removing the following “folder” from the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER’Software’Microsoft’Windows’
CurrentVersion’Explorer’AltTab

That will delete all of the settings that you just entered in, and the Alt-Tab appearance will revert back to how it was previous to importing the values into the registry. If you wanted to mess with all of the values, it might be easier to open the registry editor, findi the location above, and edit the values there since you can enter them in as a normal decimal number:

If you’re like me, you keep your system up to date and patched. It’s good practice, but a bit annoying under Vista (at least under Ultimate Edition) because even if you’ve applied all the updates you need you’re constantly shown that you have 14 optional updates. Turns out they’re all language packs… I’m pretty sure I don’t need Chinese or Dutch language packs installed.

It turns out it’s pretty easy to hide them from view. Open Windows Update and click on View available updates. You’ll see something like this:

Notice all the languages that you’ll never have a need to use. All you have to do to hide these updates, is to right-click on an item in the list, and choose “Hide update” from the menu.

Pretty easy eh? Now when you go to Windows Update you’ll see what you expect: “No new updates available…”. If you ever want them back there’s a “Restore hidden updates” link on the left-hand side of the screen that will let you put them back in the list.

I rarely use network shares on my computers. Ok, I have a few setup for the family to use if they need to copy something from one computer to another and a share for our network storage. Other than that I have always favored using admintrative shares. These don’t show up in network neighborhood, but can be accessed by using \\computername\C$. The “$” at the end of a share name makes it invisible to network browsing, but otherwise it is a regular share. As the name implies, administrative shares are only available to those in the Local Administrators security group. This is turned off by default in Vista. Bummer, it’s so handy… I guess that’s part of the big security push. *shrug*

To enable administrative shares you gotta make a registry change. Click on the orb and in the search box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Add a new DWORD called “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy” and give it a value of 1. Reboot and yer done!

System restore is never anything I found particularly useful… in fact I don’t know that I’ve ever even used it. However, I’ve always left it enabled just in case. In Windows XP you could configure the amount of drive space System Restore uses via a slider control. No such control exists in Windows Vista and by default the sucker is configured to use up to 15 percent of your available drive space! Ok… 15% for something I don’t think I’ve ever used… I don’t think so.

To store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each hard disk that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

My laptop currently has a 60g drive and it’s allocated 5.136g of space. Of course this isn’t visible via the interface but to find out you can open a command prompt. Click on the start menu (or the orb as it seems to be called nowadays) and in the searc box type ‘command’, right click on the Command Prompt icon and select Run as Administrator. You’ll then see a DOS command prompt open up… type the following to see the current settings:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

What you’ll see is something like the following:

The command to set the amount of space used follows this syntax:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So to configure your drive to only use 2 gigs of space on your C: drive you’d to the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

That’s it! You’ve recovered some space. If you find system restore useful I’d recommend not touching this setting, or at least not reducing it too much. But if you’re somebody like me who’s never used it you can easily reclaim some space.