John Bradbury - Technology Blog

At some point in time we’ve all come across someone who’s forgotten their password. Normally this is a friend or family member who has you on speed dial for all those PC related emergencies. At work where we deal with domain environments resetting a users password is a simple task. Unfortunately things are not so simple if the PC is a standalone system. At least that’s what we’ve been led to believe. The simple fact is that Windows XP passwords can be easily recovered if they are less than 14 characters long.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to quickly recovery Windows XP passwords using software freely available on the internet.
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The final video in this series looks at multimedia support in Ubuntu and sums up my experience with Linux so far. I hope everyone has enjoyed the series and hopefully I’ll have a chance to come back to Linux at a future date and create a few more videos once I know what I’m doing.

Yesterday’s video seems to have gone down well with the vast majority of you which is really great. I also seemed to have peaked the interest of aldenhg who suggests I’m not a Windows Systems Administrator but best chums with Linus Torvalds himself, lol

Just to answer his question - Yes I am aware of BartPE but I don’t think you can seriously compare it to the Ubuntu LiveCD I was using in yesterdays video. For a start most normal users wouldn’t be able to create their own BartPE CD, it’s difficult to get working across multiple machines, and it’s against the terms of your licensing agreement with Microsoft.

Further more I seriously doubt that an awareness of BartPE can be used as a measuring stick by which to gauge if someone is actually a Systems Administrator or not. Go back to fixing grandad’s PC ….

In today’s video I looked at the office functionality availble in Ubuntu, hope you enjoy.

Okay so people keep telling me how great Linux is and how user friendly it can be for people making the move from Windows. So I decided to give it a try and record the experience for good measure.

In total I’m going to create three videos over the next three days. Today’s video ‘day 1′ looks at the installation process, general navigation and easy of use.

This video is a bit rougher around the edges than my previous one because it wasn’t scripted or planned out. So please forgive me if I waffled too much, lol

With the impending release of Windows Server 2008 Microsoft has made some sweeping changes to their certification programme which should separate the men from the boys, but do they go far enough?

Well first of all they’ll be getting rid of the old certification tracks like the MCSA and MCSE. Even the humble MCP will be out on it’s ear in favour of what Microsoft believe is a more straight forward framework.

The new tracks will consist of the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, Microsoft Certified IT Professional, and the daddy of them all - the Microsoft Certified Architect.
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