As Windows 7 password recovery tips and software are rich on the internet, you may be worried that if someone has got your password, and logon to your computer secretly. Now you can enable the Windows 7 built-in feature to let computer display previous logons information when you are logging on, so that you can keep track of logon attempts.
Here are two approaches for you:
Approach 1 Through the Local Group Policy Editor
1. Open the Local Group Policy Editor.
2. In the left pane, click on Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, and Windows Logon Options.
3. In the right pane, right click on Display information about previous logons during user logon and click on Properties.
4. To display previous logon information, check option Enabled and click on OK.
5. Close the Local Group Policy Editor window.
Approach 2 Through Registry Editor
1. Open the Start Menu, then type regedit in the search box and press Enter.
2. In regedit, navigate to the location below.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
4. In the right pane, right click on an empty area and click on New and DWORD (32-bit) Value.
5. Type DisplayLastLogonInfo as the name and press Enter.
6. Right click on DisplayLastLogonInfo and click on Modify.
7. To display last logon information, type 1 and click on OK. 0 is for the contrary.
10. Close regedit.
11. Restart the computer to apply the changes.

Password protection is good for system and file security, but it leads to problems too, many people forgot Windows password or office password, or faced the trouble that the password was changed by others. So if you are sharing a computer with other users, to avoid unknown password, disable password setting in Windows and office like these.

Warning: Before disabling password setting, make sure there is no unauthorized access.

Disable Windows password reset

1. Computer (right click) -> management -> local users and groups -> users.

2. Select the target account, double click it, check User cannot change password, OK.

Login with that account, try to change password in control panel, it will prompt that Windows cannot change the password.

Disable office password encryption

Since a forgotten or unknown office password might result in a big trouble, you may wonder if it is possible to prevent office file from being encrypted. Yes, you are able to disable setting new passwords in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, using the DisablePasswordUI setting in registry (Note: This method is tested in office 2007 and 2010).

Step 1 Type regedit in Run box, and press enter. Go to the below location.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Security

Step 2 In the right pane, right click on the blank area, New->DWORD(32-bit) Value to create a new value.

Step 3 Rename the value as DisablePasswordUI and double click the name to set value data as 1. 1 means office cannot be encrypted, 0 is on the contrary.

After finishing settings, you will see that the option of Encrypt Document under Prepare is gray and unavailable. In this way, you avoid the trouble of losing office password.

In Windows 7, you can do many kinds of reset. Besides Windows 7 password reset and Windows 7 system settings reset, you can reset Windows Experience Index (WEI) as well.

What is Windows Experience Index?

The Windows Experience Index evaluates the performance of your computer’s hardware and software configuration, and marks a base score, which is the same as the lowest subscore determined by a hardware component.

A higher base score generally means that your computer has better capability than a computer with a lower base score.

When you configure a new hardware in Windows 7, you could reset Windows Experience Index to rate the base score again through Advanced Tools.

Reset Windows Experience Index

1. Open the Control Panel, and then click on Performance and Information Tools (icons view).

2. In the left pane, click on the Advanced Tools link.

3. Click on Clear all Windows Experience Index scores and re-rate system link.

The WEI score will now be reset, and the WEI tests will now run automatically to rate this computer for a new WEI score.

NOTE: To completely reset WEI, you should do either method 1 or method 2 below to delete all of the .xml files, so you can start fresh again.

Delete all of the .xml files

Method 1 Through command prompt

1. Open a command prompt.

2. In the command prompt, copy and paste the below command and press enter.

del /f %SYSTEMROOT%\Performance\WinSat\DataStore\*.xml

3. Close command prompt window.

Method 2 Through Windows Explorer

1. Open Windows Explorer, and navigate to the location below.

C:\Windows\Performance\WinSat\DataStore

2. In the Data Store folder, select all of the listed .xml files and delete them.

3. You can now update your WEI score.

You may know that to give your computer a better security, it is suggested that Windows users change the login password every month. To let computer notify you to do Windows 7 password reset regularly, you can set password expiration in Windows 7.

Enable password expiration

1.      Open the Local Users and Groups administration panel. Do this in these easy ways: Start –> then enter lusrmgr.msc into the start menu search box. or right click computer ->management-> Local Users and Groups

2.      Double click to select your user.

3.      Uncheck the option “Password never expires”.

4.      Click OK, and it is done.

Set password expiration time

Method 1

Step 1 In start search box, type Local Security Policy and press enter.

Step 2 Local Security Policy editor will appear. In the left pane, expand Account Policies -> Password Policy, and then double Maximum Password age option.

Step 3 Change the age and apply.

This security setting determines the period of time (in days) that a password can be used before the system requires the user to change it. You can set passwords to expire after a number of days between 1 and 999, or you can specify that passwords never expire by setting the number of days to 0. It is best to have passwords expire every 30 to 90 days, depending on your environment.

Method 2

Step 1 Type cmd in Start search box and press enter.

Step 2 Type “net accounts” and press Enter to see the current “Maximum password age”.

Step 3 To enable password expiration and set expiration time for all users, type the command “net accounts / maxpwage:xx” and press Enter.

Note: As said above, you‘d better replace xx with number from 30 to 90.

Step 4 Close the command prompt.

When the password is expired, at the logon screen, it will ask you to input the old password, and reset Windows 7 password to a new one.

When people delete a file and clear the recycle bin as well, the file is seemingly lost forever, but for some reason, the file is needed again. Many users have met that problem. Is it possible to regain it? Luckily, like windows 7 password reset, you can recover deleted file as well, as long as nothing has taken over the deleted file place on hard disk.

To recover file, you need a file recovery tool. A freeware called Restoration is effective at recovering deleted files and doesn’t require any sort of installation.

1) To use Restoration, simply choose the Hard Drive which your deleted file was in from the drive list in the software interface. For example, if the deleted file in F disk, choose F: drive.

2) Click the Search Deleted File button, the program will scan the target hard drive for deleted files.

3) When the scanning procedure is complete, it will show a list of files that are recoverable.

4) Click the Restore By Copying button to restore the files. Be sure to restore them to another disk drive to avoid the risk of overwriting the original information you are trying to recover.

This method is the remedy for all file lose problems. The tool could recover files from emptied Recycle Bin, formatted hard drive or lost partition as well as other unknown reasons under Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7.