Computer Tricks and Secrets

Short answer: Go to haveibeenpwned.com , type in your email address, and it tells you which known data breaches included your details. If you show up in any breach, change that password everywhere you reused it and switch on two-factor authentication today. I have lost count of how many times a friend has messaged me in a panic asking "is my email hacked?" after seeing a weird login alert. The honest truth is that most people have some data floating around from an old breach, and that is fine as long as you react properly. In this guide I walk through the exact checks I run and the cleanup I do afterwards. What "hacked" usually means When I say an account was compromised, I normally mean one of two things. Either your password leaked in a bulk data breach of a website you used, or someone guessed or phished it directly. The first case is far more common. Companies get breached, the stolen username and password lists get traded online, and attackers try those sa...

Short answer: If your PC uses a Microsoft account, reset the password online at account.live.com/password/reset from your phone and sign back in. If it uses a local account, use your password reset disk or the security questions on the lock screen. This guide is only for regaining access to a computer that belongs to you. A quick but important note before anything else: everything below is for your own machine, or one you have clear permission to fix. Bypassing a password on someone else's computer is a different thing entirely and I do not cover that. With that said, I have been locked out of my own laptop more than once, and here is exactly how I get back in without wiping my files. First, work out which account type you have Modern Windows 10 and Windows 11 sign-ins come in two flavours, and the fix is completely different for each. Microsoft account : you log in with an email address (Outlook, Hotmail, or similar). This is the easy case. Local account , a username tha...