My experience with AutoMZ Ultimate Tweaker (not good)

I made a very brief post about this issue when it happened, and almost immediately another forum member PM'ed me saying he had the same problem, so I do not believe it is an isolated incident.

I was going through the stickied "Tweaks" thread and ran the program AutoMZ Ultimate Tweaker recommended in tip #16. When asked by the program, I chose "safe" tweak instead of the more aggressive tweak. I restarted the computer when the program prompted me to, and when the Windows logon screen appeared, I was unable to logon.

I knew I had not changed my password, so I was immediately concerned. A post I made to this forum asking for advice on what to do in this situation was immediately closed, thanks for that by the way . I figured somehow the password must have been changed or reset. So I then proceeded to spend the next five or six hours trying to teach myself how to crack or reset a Vista password.

Note: For anyone looking for info on how to do this, you won't find it here, that's a no-no. For those concerned about Vista PW security, rest assured it is much more difficult (at least for an amateur like me) than if the computer had been XP or prior.

After hours of learning and futile attempts, I was about ready to go to sleep with the intent of formatting and re-installing the OS the following morning. I decided to drink a beer and think a bit more about my problem - perhaps the password had not been reset; maybe something else was wrong. With this in mind, I randomly thought about the handicapped options on the Vista logon screen I had played with earlier in frustration. I opened the on-screen keyboard, typed in my password, and voila!

I don't know what AutoMZ Ultimate Tweaker did that caused the computer to not recognize either the password or the keystrokes themselves. Fortunately I had recently created a system backup, and was able to revert to that point with no problems. Needless to say, I deleted that POS program.

I am sure dozens of people will come to AutoMZ Ultimate Tweaker's defense and say, "I used it with no problems." My response to that, is that within a matter of days of this tweak being posted on this board, two users were locked out of their computers and at least one (me) was ready to reformat his computer. This is too many. People who read this thread will fortunately know how to get around this issue, (assuming the exact same thing goes wrong for them and not something else) but users of this program who do not read this forum are at much greater risk.

Cliff notes: I ran AutoMZ Ultimate Tweaker and was locked out of my computer because my password no longer worked when typed on the keyboard. I was able to logon by using the virtual on-screen keyboard. AutoMZ Ultimate Tweaker does not work as promised, and IMO is dangerous.

Thank you for letting me share my experience, vent, and possibly help someone.

Mac Hooke

 

That is quite interesting. I used AutoMZ the other day and have had nothing but positive effects on my notebook. However, I do agree with you that the program is dangerous if it locks you out of Vista.

How is it that some people have had positive effects after using it while others had almost fatal effects? What does this program do exactly?

Just a side note: After finally logging into Vista, did you find your computer ran faster?

 

I am very interested in any input that may come here as I authored the thread that AutoMz is a part of. I was going to include the program about a month ago but was convinced then to hold back on it for awhile and have had the opportunity to test it on several systems since.

I have not experienced any problems much less the problem described. This is not to say it never occurred, but rather, if it did I would like to here other experienced with respect to its use.

As with any program, there will be those who experience negative and the feedback will determine whether I keep the program in the tweaks or not. As unfortunate as it is for the two cases described, several have raved that the program works wonders.

Im wondering, if there are other instances, if I could offer a warning or suggestion as Sac02 seems to have found a way around the negative.

 

I didn't not experienced anything negative, but .............

After doing a Safe tweak(expect for the CPU), I noticed my mouse was super fast, Firewall bubble said it was off, and folder settings were changed. I immediately did a System Restore since I didn't feel like doing any further investigating or changing settings back.

I think more input of what it actually does would make this tweaker more useful & trusted.

 

As I have said before, any tweaker app that does not fully disclose EXACTLY what it does, should be looked upon with a very jaundiced eye. I don't trust them and won't run them, except in a very secure environment where I have a complete disk image prior to running. And even then I am quite leery. Too many of these apps are written by pure amateurs.

Gary

 

When I ran it, I had the same NumLk issue another poster in the tweaks thread had. After fiddling with it for a few minutes, I decided my lappy was running fine the way it was and restored back prior to installation of this program.

My unwillingness to delve into it aside,

Good Job Flamenko and all who have contributed to the tweaks thread. It is by far the most definitive guide I have found and it goes past the idiot proof tweaks you find in PC magazines.

 

never heard about that software...but seems a good example for me. As I develop WinBubble...Anyway, please try it. I have released the next version.

I'm waiting for freewarefiles and softpedia to include in their list.

If you have some comments and suggestion. Please pm me.
Thanks...

Good Job Guys!

 

Yea... nate_ohio makes me wonder if it was because of the NumLK issue that part of us have. Did you check during that time if your NumLK is on? If its on, that make sense that you can't actually login as if your password contain numbers (Which i believe you have), then any numbers you type will not be register as NumLK is on.

 

I just used automz and nothing bad happened to my computer. I was really scared because I was reading this post as it was performing the optimization. lucky nothing bad happened after the reboot!

 

Me too. No problems here, maybe it was just some freak accident.

 

I may be wrong but the adverse effect was that 2 people would reboot their system and numlock came on. Because of this they had trouble entering the correct passwords because it was on and, once realized, they turned it off and everything was fine from then on was it not?

Next, they just set their system (bios I believe) so numlock does not come on at boot and all was fine.

Is this the jist of it?

 

I cannot speak for the other forum member, but my password did not contain any numbers, so it is unlikely that it was a numLK issue. My password was a simple 6 character word without even a capitalized letter, but I tried every combination of shift or caps lock known to man anyway. After trying about 1000 different ways of typing in what I knew should be my PW, then I went looking for a way to crack or reset the password.

I feel I can take some credit for thinking "outside the box" regarding the fact that maybe my password had not actually been changed or reset as I originally thought, but that perhaps windows just wan't recognizing the correct PW for some reason. It was mostly luck that I decided to see if the on-screen keyboard would work, and fortuneatly it did - I got into windows first try using the same password I had been typing on the physical keyboard all along - only this time I "clicked" it in with my mouse on the handicap-access on-screen keyboard.

The silver lining to this is that while learning about cracking, I also learned what makes a PW difficult to crack. Six letters is not hard to crack if you have the right tools. My password now is now a mix of 15 letters, numbers, and special characters (!@#$%^&, etc.), and should be exponentially more secure.

Mac

 

Even if you don't use numbers (or maybe even especially) in your password, If numlk is on on any laptop without a seperate numpad, you'll get the little numbers written in the corner instead of the letter. That will cause any password using any of those letter to come out wrong. The on-screen keyboard won't be affected by that, and will work.

 

This tweak just doesn't work for me. After using it, my system got screwed up. (longer time to open the control panel! Com'on, I'm using a SSD!)
Also, though it shorten the shutdown time, that tweak just made my logoff sound couldn't play completely, which drove me mad.

As a result, I'm REFOMATTING my computer BECAUSE of that tweak!

P.S. I didn't have any password problem as I used my finger

 

Ah, I didn't understand the numLK thing at first. Yes, I did have one letter in my password that was part of the number pad. I'm very curious now if that is what happened. However, I'm not curious enough to re-run the program to try and duplicate the problem.

Mac

 

Could these problems be due to the user inputting the wrong system information (Ex.: Processor, Internet Connection, etc.) before running the tweak?

 

No way! I'm not a computer idiot. I just checked "Vista" and CPU "auto detect"
After applying the tweak, my CPU kept at a high % usage, which drove me mad.

If you wanna defend the tweak, just go for that. What I wanna say is that, the tweak is somehow too aggressive.

 

Its not to defend the tweak or not. This program has been out for quite awhile and if you yahoo it, there is plenty of support for it.

What we are trying to do is figure out exactly why it would have behaved like that on your system and not elsewhere. Its the same thought process as the other two negative comments.

Perhaps if we can pinpoint why its doing what it is doing, we can better assess it overall.

 

flamenko, the problem I had after applying the tweak:
1.It took whole 5 sec with a blank window before showing the control panel
2.My CPU went weird (It just seemed like it's "excited" all the time)
3.No difference on boot up time
4.Vista shut before the logoff sound played completely (Well, this can be considered as personal issue)

The option I chose was Vista, CPU "auto detect," "performance tweak (not the stable one, and this may be the point)" and the two option tweak.

To be honest, I just hate fomatting my computer. (I don't know why my restore function didn't work...Vista said access denied with an error code)

 

No problems here... However, no apparent performance increase either.

 

My post wasn't really negative, I just didn't want to bother with fixing it.

I am willing to try anything Flamenko and the other members contribute to the tweak thread. Because I know that Flamenko thoroughly tests things before he adds them to his thread. Once again, thanks for all your contributions guys.

 

I can provide another data point - sure wish I'd read this thread yesterday, would have saved me hours, but I Learned Stuff(tm). I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 on an Asus G2S-A1.

AutoMZ was run with the correct settings (CPU autodetect) and Safe rather than Powerful Optimization.

Key consequences I spotted:

1. The killer problem IS just a numlock-at-boot-time issue - in my case, multiple System Restores (going progressively back in time) after booting from the install CD eventually made the problem go away - only needed because I was too dim to notice the numlock had come on.

By then, I'd also researched various Linux/boot-cd-based password reset possibilities, and found one at least that works on XP but definitely didn't on my Vista (it just seemed to. Pity).

After the successful system restore, I ran the AutoMZ util again to confirm that the numlock problem recurs - it tweaks the following regkey on for my system:
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators - sets to 2, should be 0.

2. A secondary problem (and the likely cause of alexzeon's truncated shutdown music) is that it sets the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/ SYSTEM/ CurrentControlSet/Control/WaitToKillServiceTimeout to just 2000ms! Way too aggressive IMO (default is 20,000ms). I changed it to 4000ms and that seems ok for my system.

I didn't spot any other bad consequences, and hadn't benchmarked startup time so can't say how much it improved for me, if any. It feels a bit faster, but I've been disabling services and other things to make life quicker, so who knows how well it did. I do know the old boot tuner I once used for XP worked wonders on that.


So I give AutoMZ a mixed review - it's frankly terrifying that it can make someone think their Vista install is inaccessible, even though the cause is simple. And I firmly agree with those who say there needs to be more upfront info about what it is doing.


Now, some valuable lessons I learned during the awful "sh*t! My Vista is inaccessible!" phase:

* DO enable the default Administrator account, and give it a password (maybe away from the numlock portion of your keyboard ). When you are seemingly locked out of your normal account (esp. if that one has admin rights too), it's too late to cry about the other account you could have used, if you'd only enabled it. Vista's F8 safe mode boot will not auto-enable the default Admin account so long as there is a another valid admin account available - so if you've forgotten or cannot type your regular pwd, you're toast.

* DO create a password recovery disk, or two. Spare SD cards are good (they can have other uses if you wish, so long as you keep the tiny password file in root).

* DO make System Restore points before doing what may be significant risky things; you can rely on the Vista install CD to restore things pretty reliably.

* DO acquaint yourself with the fact that Vista has no Recovery Console, but can get to a command-line from its install disk, and also has a install-repair facility analogous to XPs.

* DO hunt for solutions which allow the password hive to be reset in dire straits. They certainly exist, though I'm not convinced there is one which will work reliably for Vista. So it's definitely last-resortville, with no guarantees.

* DO use a utility like Windows Backup, DriveSnapShot or similar to maintain an off-computer image of your boot disk. Once you stop tweaking it every five minutes . That becomes your absolute last resort.

Happy New Year.

 

I had the same problem !!!!
I used the tool and i had a password, i reboot my PC and i couldn't login!
(I was getting crazy like hell )
After some time (like after 50 reboots in all modes (safe mode,...) ) i used the screen keyboard to put in my password AND IT WORKED !

I don't know why but when i was in my windows i immediately disabled the password login and did a system restore (went 2days back or something) and now my Vista works normal again (But now i don't use a password login any more )

So this is STRANGE

 

I have a new HP laptop and this happened to me. Since I'm a newbie, how do I fix it? What do I need to do to remove the program and get it back to the way it was? Any help would be appreciated. Sorry, but instructions would need to be spelled out. If I remove the program, does it go back to normal? I have the recovery disk from HP, do I need to upload everything again? If so, how do i do that?