The Smorgasbord

Staying on the topic of Linux LiveCD’s, OPHCrack is a tool that you can use to break, crack, or retrieve any Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista password quickly and effectively. Here’s the background….in our house friends and family know we work on computers and can fix and repair them. It seem like every month one is dropped off for on reason or another. Usually the problems are the same – the computer is slow because of heavy surfing on the web and has some kind of virus or trojan. But we got one the other day with a really simple problem – they setup a password to login and forgot what it was. The computer was a couple years old and Windows XP.

Seems like someone dropped a computer because of a forgotten or lost password a few years back, and at that time the only solution I managed to find after hours and hours of searching was a linux boot floppy with some tools to reset the password by editing the registry and some other file. My son found OPHCrack for this time around, and he managed to crack and reveal the lost password in just minutes. All you have to do download and burn the LiveCD, and then bootup using it on the computer with the lost password – then use OPHCrack to crack it and you’re good to go! There are some Linux tools out there that allow you to reset a Windows password (like the one I used to have), but this one just flat out cracks the password for you. It worked well for us, we were very pleased. The program is free and legal – just don’t be using it for illegal or illicit purposes! Bookmark the page, you might forget your own password someday!

Here’s another nice resource I found stumbling around, a list of 315 Linux Live CD’s for download. LiveCD’s are great because you don’t have to install anything on your computer to run a complete operating system. Nice to use as a guest on someone else’s pc, but more importantly it’s a great way to try out a Linux distribution without having to install it on the hard drive. This list is sorted by number of votes, so the more popular ones are on the top. Also – if you’re into Linux you may not realize how many different kind of distros are out there. Like ones specifically for education, gaming, medical, security, home entertainment. You may be surprised to find out though, that many liveCD’s contain tools for specific purposes. Like computer forensic tools, firewall tools, diagnostic utilities, data recovery, server clustering, and of course OS replacement. Download a couple and try a new version of Linux today!