This tool decommissions quite the list of Windows 7 through 10 telemetry inclusions by which Microsoft informs itself of our behavior, using quite a lot of our RAM, CPU, and bandwidth in so doing.
https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/
Brought to this forefront by the Beard, Mike Hunsinger.
If you have access to the console and the machine runs GRUB or something similar, reset of a password is easy. Just interrupt the boot before kernel load (hit the Tab key if it really is GRUB you have there), edit the kernel load line, and add the following to the very end:
init=/bin/bash
Then boot that kernel load line (F10 in GRUB) and the machine will come up in single-user ‘bash’ shell, and you can run ‘passwd’.
The amazing David Lewis recently discovered something very close to unbelievable. A user profile on a PC — not a user, not a PC — had full administrative rights to a folder on a server on the domain, where the user was explicitly denied such rights. Deletion and replacement of the user profile, eliminated the problem.
It was “control userpasswords2” in XP. Under Windows 7, put this in the start-button search box:
netplwiz
The box you want, will come right up. This also handles auto-login if the machine is not attached to a domain.