Yup, Win 9x didn’t have any security to speak of. This didn’t affect only Win 9x, although you could at least lock things down in NT. I remember using Citrix on NT 3.51 and NT 4. Since Citrix was of course meant for remote access, you had to be careful where there might have been backdoors, such as through Office. Going to Help…About, you could launch what was the equivalent of MS Config giving you access to a bunch of stuff.
I used to do this at school somewhere around 96-97.
Later they put up a forced auto-login to a very restricted student user account.
Easy. Open Word and go to Help->About. Back in those days there were a button to start the Explorer from the About dialogs in any Office program.
And welcome into the school server. Zero security let us snoop around all the files on the teachers’ accounts. We even set up some computers to play Warcraft II over LAN.
Yes, this worked. IIRC, on 9x you could also boot to dos mode (shift+F5?) and delete c:windows*.pwl – this would clear out any local passwords. Network resources would be unavailable but it’s not like 9x was a serious networking client anyway.
via: [Fail Blog]
Yes, it did work. The whole win9x login “security” was a joke.
Yup, Win 9x didn’t have any security to speak of. This didn’t affect only Win 9x, although you could at least lock things down in NT. I remember using Citrix on NT 3.51 and NT 4. Since Citrix was of course meant for remote access, you had to be careful where there might have been backdoors, such as through Office. Going to Help…About, you could launch what was the equivalent of MS Config giving you access to a bunch of stuff.
I used to boot my dads XP machine in safe mode and disable the passwords
Yep, it does actually work – I used to do it at school’s PCs. 🙂
I remember one set up (95 or 98 I think) that you could just click cancel and be taken to a fall back desktop with no rights restrictions :S
I used to do this at school somewhere around 96-97.
Later they put up a forced auto-login to a very restricted student user account.
Easy. Open Word and go to Help->About. Back in those days there were a button to start the Explorer from the About dialogs in any Office program.
And welcome into the school server. Zero security let us snoop around all the files on the teachers’ accounts. We even set up some computers to play Warcraft II over LAN.
Yes, this worked. IIRC, on 9x you could also boot to dos mode (shift+F5?) and delete c:windows*.pwl – this would clear out any local passwords. Network resources would be unavailable but it’s not like 9x was a serious networking client anyway.