Why every good toolkit should have Linux
No matter if you're exclusively a Windows shop, every good IT technician needs Linux in their toolkit. A bootable Linux CD has saved my bacon more than once. I'll start with something simple, but yet undoubtedly an issue that is faced by somebody, somewhere every day.
It's the problem of the forgotten administrator password. You have a Windows box but can't log in. Nobody remembers the password. Or, you can log in as a regular user but can't make changes - because nobody remembers the administrator password.
For this, Daniel Petri's page is the ultimate resource. He begins with three options: make the user remember - but that's not likely to happen; recover from an emergency recovery disk (ERD) - but that doesn't apply to all versions of Windows or the ERD probably doesn't exist or is out of date; and lastly boot from an alternate operating system which has tools to manipulate the appropriate files to reset the forgotten password.
