If I lose my fingers, then what?

Ok. I forgot my password. Windows 7 Ultimate.

I'm going to blame biometrics for my memory problem, but that's not the point.

Good thing I still remember my fingerprints... I can log in but I cannot reset my password since I don't remember the old one.

Any suggestions? (Besides deserved criticism).

Create a new Admin account.  Then login with that and use computer management to reset the other account's password.

@blowdart: Neat.  I didn't realize you could reset the same account currently in use.

Open up CMD.exe

Type "net user *"

Type in your new password and press ENTER

Type it in a second time and press ENTER

Congratulations, your password has been changed.

@blowdart: Ah! Much thanks and praise!

Hope make it home with my fingerprints intact.

BTW, thanks for your WCF callback project, helped me out.

42 minutes ago, evildictaitor wrote

Open up CMD.exe

Type "net user *"

Type in your new password and press ENTER

Type it in a second time and press ENTER

Congratulations, your password has been changed.

That's so easy I'm nervous about it.

This works? Only need be local Admin?

@JohnAskew: Don't even need to be admin if I remember correctly.

It works because you are already signed in. Of course if you weren't signed in it would be somewhat less trivial to change your password.

Imo, it should always require admin password even if I logged in with my password. It is possible a guest is going to mess up my account if I don't log off, that's terrible.

30 minutes ago, magicalclick wrote

 

Imo, it should always require admin password even if I logged in with my password. It is possible a guest is going to mess up my account if I don't log off, that's terrible.

For the record you can't do this from the guest account, although, yes, if you give your laptop to a friend with you logged in then all bets are off.

@evildictaitor:

WP7 is better. If you have a password, you have to enter the password if you want to remove or change it. No more  password reset pranks when you let them play your games.

@evildictaitor: That's bizarre. Trying to change your password via ctrl-alt-del requires the current one. Why wouldn't net user do the same? Seems like a pretty big oversight.

@Sven Groot: Net User is doing the same thing as resetting the password via the users control panel, which means it also suffers in that it will break access to EFS encrypted files and so on. What's more annoying really is that a fingerprint swipe can't be used in the ctrl+alt+delete method if you've forgotten what the actual underlying password actually is.