Windows Vista and the Administrator

Well, I'm typing this on the eve of Windows 7's release and by the time you read it it will have been out for a month. Nearly.

It's being hailed as the next big thing, perhaps even big enough to erase that abomination that was Windows Vista.

I had occasion recently to have to work on a laptop running Vista Home. Most of the systems where I work are still running Windows XP for two reasons; it works (relatively) well on the cruddy hardware we have, and it is nowhere near as infuriating as Windows Vista.

My task was to clear a password for an administrative user on the laptop because the admin password had been lost.

Believe it or not, this is normally ridiculously simple. I boot with my trust RIP Linux CD, mount the hard disk, and then run chntpw to wipe the password. Reboot to Windows, log in. Done this hundreds of times with XP and have had no problems. Easy peasy.

Given that Vista is largely XP with more hassles layered on...well, okay, given that Vista is still the same basic code base as XP, it still uses the SAM portion of the registry to save password data. Shouldn't be any issue with wiping the password.

I booted, mounted the drive, checked for a /mnt/sda3/windows/system32/config/SAM file, and ran chntpw. Rebooted.

Um...where's the administrator?

Turns out...THERE ISN'T ONE! Surprise! On me!

By default the administrator account is turned off. Instead there's an administrative user account used by the system. Otherwise you have to go and enable it on Vista Home using a boot disk and command prompt. Check it out here.

So apparently I cleared a password for a user that doesn't work. @#$%

I was irritated. This was one of the few constants I have counted on in my administrative duties, having an administrator account available. Systems fall off the domain, systems have issues that necessitate a login to the local machine, now it doesn't work quite right.

I shouldn't be quite so irritated. Many Linux distros have started moving away from having the root user enabled, forcing you to instead use sudo to gain privileges. Ubuntu does it and OS X does it, both of which I use constantly.

I guess my main peeve is that those are systems I use. I know them. I generally can find my way around under the hood. When your job means having a system dumped on you with no back history available and the directive to get it working, though, this adds another layer of frustration since now I have to figure out another piece of the puzzle just to log into the damn thing.

It goes back to usability. One of the strengths of the Mac was that Apple was the most anal retentive companies about how their system appears and how your application looks and behaves. If you ask the user what word is in the upper left corner, it's going to be the active application. In Windows you have to guide the user ever so gently into figuring out which menu bar is highlighted to figure out the current window that is active. Menus may or may not follow the same order (you can imagine the calls and hair loss after Office 2007 was released with their wonderful redesigned ribbon bar for a menu...)

The ability to have a quick and easy way to log in was something I took for granted. No matter which head twitch configured the system or what knob had screwed it up, I could use administrator on the local machine to log in. No more.

I read that windows 7 continued the new tradition. Just another reason to want to cry some days in the tech pits, I suppose. It would be different if more people were knowledgeable about the tools they're misusing, but such is life.

In case you're curious, which you might not be, I did get into that system. I figured out which user from the menu was the admin user and then booted back to rip, and this time used chntpw with the -u parameter to specify the username whose password I wanted to erase. Voila. Worked.

*sigh*