Sometimes things go so alarmingly "right" that you are almost breathless as you stand there in contemplation. With two days still to go till Pay Day, a bad case of Something You Ate Last Night Won't Leave Your Insides Alone and seven telephone calls to your students still to go until you can knock off and go for a pizza and beers, small delights are so welcome, and I am pleased to report one such today . . . .

Sometimes things happen which seem blatantly likely, but you live each day in the not unreasonable expectation that they won't. However, not long ago, one such actually did happen and was quite breathtaking - not least because of the unbelievable chutzpah of the perpetrator, who in this case was one of our students here at our private English school. I had already been told by Korean speakers who knew me that someone (and I could just imagine who!) had clearly been looking over my shoulder and so got wind of my username and password for MSN and used the privilege to put all sorts of vile language across the 'net. This led to me hastily changing my password for the otherwise redundant MSN Passport.

Of course, critics - or at any rate, those with a dry or otherwise amusingly perverted sense of humour - might point out that this is precisely what one should expect from the likes of Micro$oft, whose approach to "security" has historically been akin to a gardener's soil riddle, or that colander you use to wash lettuce in the kitchen. Wasn't it the very fear of this that drove you to Mandriva's loving arms in the first place? And having cut their metaphorical password-cracking teeth on something as relatively simple as 98SE and MSN Messenger, what would they turn their attention to next?

Cue the next place of work, and a spanking new system complete with a nice wide LCD screen and a fast processor, possibly the best system to work on in the whole building, and running XP Pro! And what did said culprit do? He entered a new password which no-one else knew and effectively closed us all out of our lovely little system. When apprehended, he is reputed to have said (by way of a clue): "What is the weight of dung?"

So for weeks this system, which is so well set-up in respect of its relationship with the printer in particular, has been belly-up and unable to assist us in any way. The Boss was all set to call in an "engineer" (puke . . . someone with a "rescue disc" . . .).

Since I completed the ICS course in PC Repair and Maintenance some years ago, I have never bought a new computer but built them instead; installed and configured all the software; I know what I'm doing! So last weekend, when I was in fact enjoying a rare (but skint, as Pay Day was so far away) Korean holiday, I did a search on Dogpile and located an Israeli site,

http://www.petri.co.il/,

which I had visited before on several occasions, and which had another link to where I could download a copy of an ISO file from a Norwegian site,

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

which, when cut to a disc, became a Linux boot disc which could access the security password files on an XP system! And that's just what I did . . . a terrible waste of a whole disc, as the ISO is only about 3Mb, but what the hell, they sell 'em in tubs of fifty here for less than a fiver, what do I care?

To cut a long story short, my Boss didn't understand what I was on about originally and I had to ask a Korean co-worker to explain it all to him. And after the final lesson tonight, and (let's be honest about this!) several attempts to get it right, lo! and behold! - up pops the correct user desktop, password-free and ready for the Boss to set new passwords. I am a hero (the Boss said: "You should be a computer engineer!" . . . "What are you talking about?" I said: "I am a computer engineer!") and a very important piece of kit is liberated for the benefit of all.

The software was developed for system admins and others to reset passwords under NT and earlier versions of Windoze when these had been accidentally (or otherwise!) reset, and it seems to have worked well. I recommend Peter Nordahl-Hagen's "Offline NT Password and Registry Editor" wholeheartedly and there is an informative discussion forum with plentiful links at:

http://www.petri.co.il/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=c2a0435278deb786f0f4590ca2aee931&f=27

for those among us who are unfortunate enough to have this disconcerting experience. Both a helpful "manual" and an associated FAQ can be downloaded from the same site.

And so a longer-than-expected Tuesday grinds to a close, with Radio 3 on the Internet radio as ever, my belly full of pizza and the third can of beer sliding down my throat; today was hard because I was actually unwell but I not only overcame that, I cured a stack of other problems as well. Persistence and a positive attitude do seem to be somewhat more useful than a credit card and an expensive so-called engineer!

Toodle-pip,

Andrew. ^_^b