changing admin settings

[franomania]

i have windows vista and i have an administrator profile for installing and changing stuff and a standard profile which i use for everyday web browing and the such....i forgot my administrator password so now i cant change and windows settings and stuff nor can i install anything...is there a way i can get into that account somehow or change my everyday profile to an administrator one? i cant reformat the computer because i have wayy to much stuff on it thats important to me. any quick help please?

 

[PC eye]

To simply reinstall Vista doesn't require reformatting the entire drive. I've done that twice already for a multiboot here. The one thing Vista now does over XP is rolling all existing MS created folders for the current installation whether Vista or any earlier version of Windows into a renamed "Windows.old" folder where you can retrieve anything from that. Other self created folders outside of the Windows, Program Files, DocumentsandSettings, and user files folders are untouched by the reinstallation.

There are password recovery tools avaialble to look into for a possible recovery. That would be preferred over reinstalling Windows. The reinstall of Windows does provide the option of not assigning any password for the administrator's account. One freeware may help reset the administrator password. The Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is found at http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/