password please

December 24, 2005 9:50 PM

wifi password question: I'm at a relative's for the holidays. She has wifi throughout her house but does not remember the password. Her computer however, does. How do I get the computer to tell me what the password is? It's a windows machine.
posted by garethspor to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Why not sign on to the WiFi router through her machine, and just change the password? She can then make a note of the new one.
posted by paulsc at 9:52 PM on December 24, 2005

You might try one of these apps. If you can get to the configuration dialog where the password is entered with *s or dots, then that would be the simplest route since some of those listed tools will be able to just query the dialog directly to get the password. But I don't know exactly where in the registry or filesystem the data is stored.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:09 PM on December 24, 2005

To elaborate, find out what her computer is using as a default gateway. On windows, you can get this by going to a command-prompt (start>run>cmd) and typing ipconfig /all

Look for Default Gateway. It'll probably be something like 192.168.2.1

Go to a web browser and visit http://192.168.2.1, or whatever you found above. Hopefully there won't be a password on this part. Try admin:admin, or admin:empty password.

Failing that, resetting the router using a button on the back would do it - though I doubt you want to go to all that trouble.

I have no idea where you'd find the WPA password inside windows, sorry!
posted by odinsdream at 10:11 PM on December 24, 2005

In most cases, you can perform some kind of master reset on the router to clear password/encryption. On my d-link, there's a hole on the bottom you can stick a pin into. Google your brand/model for a similar trick.

I like paulsc's suggestion though... you can usually log into the router by pointing your browser to http://192.168.1.1
or http://192.168.0.1 and once you login you can change the WEP/WPA settings, including password. If you can't login to the router because you don't know the password try googling the default or "engineering" password for your brand/model.

As always, the router's manual may be trove of relevant info, if you can find it either on-or-off-line
posted by chudmonkey at 10:11 PM on December 24, 2005

I'd be a great resource on MeFi if I were a little faster. *sigh*
posted by chudmonkey at 10:11 PM on December 24, 2005

here's a list of default passwords for wireless routers.
posted by mcsweetie at 10:23 PM on December 24, 2005

Are you talking about the WEP password that encrypts the wireless signal, or the admin password that restricts access to the router?
posted by teece at 10:32 PM on December 24, 2005

There's an online list of default passwords for wireless routers? Who needs the NSA then?

(My own router has wires, and I changed the password. Sorry, fiends!)
posted by davy at 8:38 AM on December 25, 2005

WinXP has a wizard utility that allows you to automagically setup additional boxes. If the machine you're trying to connect is also WinXP this will work for you. Got to Start -> Control Panel -> Wireless Network Setup Wizard and follow along the "add new computers to wirels network Foo" path. You'll need a flash drive or cd-r.

If you aren't running XP or if you don't have a flashdrive point the wizard at a local hard drive root. The wizard will create a folder called SMRTNTKY inside of which will be a file called WSETTING.TXT. That text file will contain everything you need to configure the Wireless network on a non XP box.

Once you are done, and if you wrote the files to the hard drive, delete the SMRTNTKY folder and the files setupSNK.exe and AUTORUN.INF at the root of the drive containing SMRTNTKY.
posted by Mitheral at 12:16 PM on December 25, 2005

If you can see the **** where windows/IE remembers the passwords for you then you can get the password back. There are a number of programs that will show you the value for **** in Windows (all versions). The program I use for this is called System Information for Windows (siw.exe).
posted by tiamat at 2:17 PM on December 25, 2005