Broken Windows

I finally started fixing some of the computers I’ve had lying around the house. Someone asked me if I was embarassed that I had three broken systems. I guess that gave me some motivation, plus I wanted to play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 on my projector and I needed a Windows PC. I’ve been using my PowerBook G4 for almost two months now and it has done everything I’ve needed except hardcore gaming. It took me about an hour to piece together all the parts into one working PC. I finally got XP to boot and then realized I had forgotten my password, and since I had increased the security settings to insane levels, I locked out all my accounts, including administrator. Sigh. So I spent another two hours downloading Linux boot CD-ROMS with utilities to “hack” the Windows password file. While I was burning one, I discovered that if you boot XP into safe mode, it happily ignores the account lockouts. I don’t know whether to laugh that I locked myself out of my own PC, or to cry that Windows would allow such an easy bypass. Well maybe tomorrow I’ll get the energy to get OpenBSD on the G3 I have sitting in the corner. I expect OpenBSD running on PPC is slightly more secure than XP.