Password Retreival

February 9, 2006 7:27 PM

So my wife brought home her little laptop from work and wants to use her wireless connect to our home wireless. No problem, her rig recognizes the network, BUT I FORGOT MY PASSWORD! Please help!!!

I'm running winXP. Is there a way to find out what my password is, or change it? BTW, I know, dumb question, I'm just kinda frustrated and not thinking right.

posted by snsranch to computers & internet (10 comments total)

The router is a D-Link DI-524, if that helps.
posted by snsranch at 7:29 PM on February 9, 2006

Just reset the router to the default settings. This will reset the admin password. You will have to set up the network again. You'll need your instruction manual.
posted by unSane at 7:29 PM on February 9, 2006

You can also get the instructions online from D-Link's website.
posted by odinsdream at 7:33 PM on February 9, 2006

Go to their website, figure out which version of their router you have and you should be able to get in and set up a new admin password, or just remove the password temporarily. There also appears to be a big ONE MINUTE ROUTER SETUP banner image at the top of the D-Link support page that might help you. This is what else the support page says

What can I do if I forgot my password?

The following reset procedure will completely restore the default settings on your D-Link device including your password. This procedure applies to the DI-514, DI-524....

Step 1 Locate the reset pinhole on the back of the unit.

Step 2 With the unit powered on, press and hold the Reset button.

Step 3 Hold the Reset button for about 10 seconds.

Step 4 Release the Reset button.

Step 5 The unit will reboot. Allow 20-30 seconds before reconnecting.

Step 6 The device is now at factory defaults.

Note: Do not recycle power during the reset procedure.

The default user name for most D-Link devices is admin and the password is left blank.
posted by jessamyn at 7:35 PM on February 9, 2006 [1 favorite]

Right on folks, thank you very much!
posted by snsranch at 7:50 PM on February 9, 2006

This being a home wireless network and all, I recommend writing the password on a piece of masking tape and sticking it to the router after you've changed it from the default.
posted by junesix at 8:14 PM on February 9, 2006

possibly dumb question but did you try going to your address 192.168.0.1 and looking for the admin login info? should be pretty simple to change the password from there.

otherwise, what everybody else said.
posted by freudianslipper at 8:29 PM on February 9, 2006

Do you mean your WAP or WEP password or the Router password?
posted by A189Nut at 1:30 AM on February 10, 2006

To amplify freudianslipper, if you know the router password but not the WAP/WEP password, you can often get it by browing to the appropriate configuration page and viewing the source (it's often just a property of the field that it's in that masks the old password).
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 12:35 PM on February 10, 2006

There's a tool in XP SP2 to do just this. It will copy your wireless settings to a USB disk which you can plug into other XP machines (or printers, etc that support the standard) and autoconfigure them.

If you need to recover the password, you can just look at the xml files written by this process to the USB key.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/getstarted/windowsconnectnow.mspx
posted by bradhill at 3:24 PM on February 14, 2006