Resetting a password and account on a Windows 7 machine

Occasionally, I help out friends and family with their PC problems and recently a case came to me that involved a Windows laptop. This laptop was sitting in a corner of some office for the past two years and eventually was given to a family member of mine as a parting gift. The only problem was, the username and password set for the login, didn't work and no-one was giving the situation attention from the original source, so it was brought to me.

Initially I was going to blow the partition away and then install a nice Linux distribution, but my family member wanted to keep the Windows installation. This was a bit difficult, because I needed to get into the system as an administrator in order to reset the password for the account, but no-one had the administrator password. In comes Hiren's BootCD. I unfortunately didn't have a CD or DVD available, so I grabbed a copy of WinCDEmu to mount the ISO in Windows and followed the instructions on using a USB key (of which I had a few) to boot the system. Following the guide to resetting a Windows password, allowed me to enable the local administrator account, reset the password and login in 15 minutes flat. After that I reset the password for the account that was there and set it to autologin (so it's more of an appliance than anything else). Another job well done, thanks to open source software.