Password

Last time this happened to me it was due to an issue with my keyboard. One of my keys was not making contact as it was sticking from some dried coffee that had dripped onto the keys.

Slowly type in your password and make sure you are seeing the asterisk key ( * ) appearing after each press?

Second, use the Restart option from your computer, not Shutdown to reboot. This will force a clean reboot. What many don't realize is that WIN 10 does not necessarily do a clean reboot from Shutdown. It saves some settings to speed up the reboot process, which can cause problems if there were some corruption issues from the previous session.

It that doesn't work, your sign-in could have been corrupted from some recent update. In this case, you need to 'Restart while holding Shift key', selecting Options and reboot into 'Safe Mode with Networking'. See if your password works. If it does, just reboot and your password should work.

Assuming you're running some version of Windows, there is a free stand-alone bootable (USB or CD) utility that can be used to recover or reset the password. It's called the Offline NT Password and Registry Editor.

https://itoolab.com/windows-password/offline-nt-password-registry-editor/

The documentation is dated, but it does work with all versions of Windows.

If you're on a Mac you'll want to boot into single user mode and then just reset your password with the "passwd" command line utility. Same with any Linux or BSD system.

Yes, Win10 Pro ... Will try this tomorrow ... Thanks M44

Just note that your known password just doesn't stop working. There is some other issue going on. Start with the easiest solutions first, working your way up. A nuclear option should be the last as you could end up causing other problems.

I'm not exactly sure what happend, but it's now open and accessing properly. I first booted it up, then restarted it. No luck. Then, I decided to disconnect the internet. Then shut down, then re-boot, then restart. The password worked.

I have no clue :( But it continues to boot up now, and operate properly.

I never did get to the solution bob nestor posted ... but M44 thanks you both for the input. Happy Camping -- and Merry Christmas :)

BTW, there's no app tool out there that guarantees it can recover a lost WIN 10 account password. If there was, countless number of systems would easily be compromised. My guess is that these tools attempt to crack your password encrypted hash stored on your system. However, if you used a sufficiently long password, even the fastest systems available today wouldn't be able to do so.

That doesn't mean hackers don't use this method. In fact, there other well known hash cracking tools freely available. Combined with the fact most use too simple a password.

Even modern laptops are capable of a trillion guesses per second attempting to extract passwords from hash. As a result, simple 4-6 character passwords can be cracked within minutes in many cases. With cloud based hacker systems available that can guess 40 trillion/sec for $100. This according to security specialist Roger A. Grimes.

Yeah, I agree that any 'PW cracking app' would defeat the concept of passwords. My thinking was more that if someway I could see/retrieve my password because it's my PC would be reasonable. But I'm not very tech smart, so much of that defeats my thinking with regards to computers and software itself. I can use it, but don't understand the nuts and bolts that make it function. As long as it works, I'm okay. Soon as it doesn't, I'm stuck.

win 10 can be set up for multiple ways to logon. password, pin, video face recognition, fingerprint, my advice set at least two of the methods up so you have a backup.

Ours are all set up for pin, password, face recognition.

face recognition is good enough that our identical twin girls can't fool the face recognition, but can fool many a neighbor and friend.

Interesting sidebar… a pair of twins we see every winter in Florida flew in from Canada last year landing an hour apart. When the second one went through customs she was pulled aside because the facial recognition system determined she was already in the US. It took a while but she figured out the issue, texted her sister to come meet her at customs, and they got it sorted out.

Dave