This last weekend I needed to change the password on my aunt’s laptop running XP. I called a buddy of mine because he does this kind of stuff alot and informed me that if it was an XP laptop that I could boot into same mode, login to the Administrator account which by default in XP has no password and then go to the account manager and update the password for her account that way. I was stoked this took me no time at all, but the last time I had to do this it required booting into the windows install disc and it was kind of pain (as I would expect it to be). But it seems like any system that you pickup that has the administrator password blank is a bit of a security issue. I always set an administrator password when i used a PC (mostly because I always logged in as the Administrator), but i would doubt that most people setting up a system they got from best buy, hp, even dell would not think to setup an administrator password if they don’t use that account.

In OS X if you want to even use the root account you have to enable it in preferences and it forces you to set a password. That is a bit better on the security side of things I think.