A common problem that occurs with just about all modern Windows operating systems is when a Windows user loses access to their data and settings. For some reason, Windows no longer recognizes a profile belonging to its user and the next time that user logs on, it appears as a fresh account. This can be caused by a hard drive error, joining/leaving a domain, file system issues and a change of username.

Reprofiler is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reassign the data and settings of a Windows user account to another account. There are ways for technicians to do this with some registry tweaks and by changing permissions (which I have personally had to do a handful of times) but this application makes it much easier so all you have to do is press some buttons.
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I have many clients who have placed passwords on their Outlook PST files to prevent family members or employees from accessing their emails. However, if they ever forget that password they have a problem – this is where PstPassword comes in.

PstPassword is a small, freeware and portable application designed to recover the password from a locked .PST file. The password encryption in Outlook is very weak and for each password protected PST file there will be 3 different passwords that could open it. One of them may be the original password that the client entered, or all 3 might be different to the original.
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Windows 7 is just about to be released (October 22) and you are going to start seeing it on clients machines when their new brand name laptop or desktop comes with it pre-installed. The problem with many brand name laptop and desktops is they often dont come with the Windows 7 disc.

This Windows 7 System Recovery Disc can be used to access the system recovery menu, giving you options such as System Restore, Complete PC Backup, Automated System Repair and Command-line Prompt. However, you cannot use this disc to re-install Windows.

If you already have access to a working copy of Windows 7, you dont need to download this because you can create this disk by going to the run dialog and type: recdisc
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Damaged docx2txt is a freeware recovery tool designed to recover text from corrupt Word 2007 XLSX files. Word 2007 files are actually a collection of zipped XML files and the XML format is somewhat unforgiving of data corruption. This application unzips the partially corrupted XML files and tries to read what it can, not caring about malformed XML. This tool pretty much just dumps the text it finds in the XML file to text.

Corrupt Excel xlsx2csv is similar to the above except it is designed to recover the content of corrupt Excel XLSX files. Again, XSLX files are based on XML files which is unforgiving to data corruption. This application has the ability to maintain the cell formatting and the cells content; including seperate workbooks in a single XLSX file. You can copy and paste the content out of the application or export the entire spreadsheet to CSV.

Both of these applications were originally Perl scripts but have since had a GUI made for them (you will see a command window though). These applications are “mostly portable” as it doesnt need to be installed but requires .NET version 2.
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Outlook is a fairly indepth program that stores a lot of data and it can occasionally become corrupted to the point where Outlook cannot be launched. Since many people use Outlook to organise their lives you can imagine how much they freak out when their information becomes corrupted.

This little tool called ScanPST has allowed me to save many stressed out clients in the past. It only does one thing but its a very important one, ScanPST will scan a Outlook data file (.pst) that you choose for corruptions and attempt to repair it.

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Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a freeware utility that allows you to change or blank the password of any user that has a valid account on a local NT/2000/XP/2003/Server 2008/Vista 32 & 64bit system. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one which makes this ideal for use with clients who have forgotten their password or were locked out by someone else. Unlocking locked or disabled accounts is also supported.

This tool comes in the form as a bootable CD ISO or Floppy disk ISO but can also be made to boot from a USB drive. The application is Linux based and it asks you questions about which drive and Windows install you would like to work with. Most questions can be answered just by pressing Enter since the best option is already chosen.

Warning: If used on user accounts that make use of EFS encrypted files, all encrypted files will become unreadable unless you remember the old password again. This is a serious technician tool and shouldn’t be used by people who don’t know what they are doing.

You should also read our “How to spot stolen hardware and why you should refuse to work on it” article before you place this application into your toolkit. Use this for only good and not evil.
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From the people that brought us CCleaner and Defraggler. Comes another file product called Recuva Portable.
Recuva Portable (pronounced “recover”) is a freeware file recovery tool that allows you to recover deleted files from hard drives, flash/USB drives, MP3 players and more. Particually those that you have sent to the Recycle Bin and then emptied.
Recuva is not unknown to many of the technicians on the Technibble forums as it gets mentioned every now and then. Its just handy that there is now a portable version of it that we can put on our USB drives for onsite work.
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Here is an interesting problem. How does someone access Windows Vistas advanced system recovery options (similar to XP’s repair console) if the computer didnt come with a Vista disk? The answer is the Vista Recovery Disk.

The Recovery disk is essentially the Windows Vista install disk, but with the operating system install files stripped out. Just download the ISO, burn it to a CD and boot the computer with it.

Note: This will only work on systems with Windows Vista installed.
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CD Recovery Toolbox is a free application designed to recover data from corrupted media like CDs, DVDs, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray etc..
The tool scans the damaged media and uses many different algorithms to recover the data which considerably increases the amount and quality of the recovered data. Once the tool finishes it shows you a full report of what it it could recover and what it couldn’t.

I have personally used this tool to recover data from a scratched CD and it worked great. I have read that this application can also recover information from CDs/DVDs that have other physical damage like liquid spills, that haven’t been burnt correctly, OS failures when reading or accessing the media and more. A very useful tool in any technicians toolbox.
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PhotoRec is a free, stand alone utility for recovering data off flash memory, hard drives and CDRoms. What makes PhotoRec special is that most other data recovery software wont recover data on flash based memory such as a camera memory card or USB thumb drive. PhotoRec will.
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