 So, a question we get all the time is how do we fix a locked Windows 10 computer because I forgot the password. We have a lot of computers that come in for this. People think there's some magic that we do or some program that we buy. Actually, most of the programs we've found just don't work anymore since the latest updates of Windows 10. But there is one way we've been able to change passwords through a series of steps which I'm going to document for you here. So, if you want to know how to do it yourself, that's what this video is for. Now, I've set up two user accounts on this computer. One's called Tom Local User and one's called just Tom Assurance. This is a Windows Live account. Now, just so you know, maybe this will solve the problem for you. If you have it tied to a Windows Live account, by going and resetting the password on a live account as long as the computer is online when you change your live account password, that will change the password to Windows 10 Live Accounts because it's actually tied to your Microsoft account so the passwords are one and the same. But for local user accounts, they are not. And there's a couple things we're going to show when we do the password removal. What happens when you change the password on each of these account types and how that works. So, if you do the web one, you don't need to follow any of these steps. You can change it on the website, follow whatever the password reset system is that they have in place and it will change the password on here as long as the computer is online. For local user, it's kind of what we're going to focus on because when you change a live account password with this method, only thing you can do is copy the files from that user. You can't ever log in as that user again because it breaks the connection it has to the live account. But with local user, you can just reset the password of the local user. So let's get started. Now, prerequisite for this. We're going to show the method because it's probably the easier way to do this because you need to boot off another CD. You can't easily get in here. There were some hacks and Microsoft's been patching them or you could just hammer away and that's what they call escape out to an elevator permission. That way doesn't really, it's not consistent. It's too hard. It's easier to boot off of another CD. So we're going to shut down the PC. Actually, we're going to restart as I have the bootable CD in here. And what I have is an Ubuntu CD. You can download it for free. I'll do a whole video on how you can do that. It's really easy, but it's not hard to download Ubuntu or any other Linux boot CD. I like Ubuntu. It's easy. It's easy to download and we're just going to go ahead and boot off the CD and try it. Now, once you're in here, what we're going to do is you need to change a file name. I'll have the documentation to in the link below here in the YouTube channel and this YouTube video or my blog post about this. There's a file you need to change to get the command prompt so we can type the commands in order to change the password. Yes, there's not some easy one click method. I know everyone's kind of looking for that. Some of the new password manager we tried some of them. They don't since the anniversary update of Windows 10, they seem to fail. So that, like I said, this is the tried and true method by which to do this. So now we're booted up with Ubuntu and we have a drive over here that happens to be where the windows drive. If you have more than one hard drive, they will show up all in here. But this one particular, we only have one hard drive on this. So that is the Windows hard drive. Then we're going to go to Windows. We're going to look for system 32. Now we need to find a file called utilman.exe. We're going to scroll way down here. And if you want to go faster, you can type it in and Ubuntu will find it. And right there it is, utilman.exe. Now we're going to rename this. Right click on it, go to rename where you can press F2. And we're going to just put an underscore and call it old. It doesn't case you ever wanted that file again. Now we need to find a file called cmd.exe. Now you can rename this, but I'm actually going to recommend you copy, paste, and now we do a rename on this. And we're going to call it utilman.exe. Same name as that. Now by doing that, what we have done is replace utility helper with cmd, command prompt. And that's all we had to do here. Now we're going to go ahead and shut down this. So now we're back in Windows 10 and we have the two local user accounts here. Now the next step is we've replaced utilman.exe with cmd.exe. We made a copy of it. So we go down here to the bottom to the ease of access, which is normally what launches utilman. And what it does is it launches an administrative command prompt. And with an administrative command prompt, that is what we need to add another user to this system that has permission to change the password for the other local user. So that command is net user. Tom is the username we're going to create and we're going to add. There's not a Tom on here already, because this one's called Tom local user and this one's called Tom as Lawrence. So net user Tom add. And then the other command we need to do is net local group administrators. Now make sure you put an S at the end of administrators because it's a group and it's not the administrator. And then the username Tom and add because what we're doing is giving this newly created user administrative permissions on this system. Command completely completed successfully. Now we only have two users here when we restart this time. The third user that has no password because we created this user password. Now we'll have permission to go into the machine. So we'll let it reboot here. And there's our new user Tom that we created. We can log in and it's going to give me the welcome screen. Okay. Now that we're logged into the user, we can go here. We're going to open up the control panel, go to the user accounts, manage another account. And now we can remove the password. If we go here, we can delete the account, change account tape, change the password. And by not doing anything, now there's no password on that account. So that removed the password for that account. It also another option would be we could set a password for that account too. But let's just remove it. And now we can sign back in as Tom local user. Now the one problem is, and we'll go here to the control panel, user accounts, manage another account. Now this is the account that is for the live account. It's tied to a live account. You notice we can either delete it, we can change account type actually won't work because we can't make it, we can make an administrator. But that won't help us any because it just give more privileges to that account, but it still won't get us into the account. There's not a lot you can do when this happens. Like I said at the beginning, the only way you can change a live account is you have to change it on the web, make sure the computer is connected to the web and it will change the password for the account. Or we can delete the account, which is often what we have to do and say keep the files. And what it's going to do is delete the account and copy all the files to the desktop. Now, if you don't have two users or if you just can create a new user on it, local user on the account, when you do this, it'll copy it to whatever account that's logged in at the time and put that on there. So here's all the files for that user. All the desktop documents, favorites, music, videos. You may lose any personalized settings that weren't saved inside of here, but you would at least have all the documents and pictures and music that you may have had stored on that user account. So that's it for changing the password on the account. Hopefully this is helpful for you and it shows the process that we generally use to do this. If you like the content here, like and subscribe. Thank you and shut down. Yeah, shut down anyway.