If you've lost or forgotten the passwords to your encrypted Microsoft Access databases, you can turn to software solutions such as ACCDB Password Portable. It's capable of looking up words in the dictionary to find password matches and of applying brute force to use combinations of all characters.

The main difference between this and the installer edition is that you can copy the portable app to a USB flash drive and run it on any PC without setup. At startup, you're welcomed by a clean and intuitive interface, where you can begin by opening a Microsoft Access file.

A couple of dictionaries are provided by the developer with English and Latin words. When it comes to brute force, it's possible to control the minimum and maximum number of characters, type (lowercase, uppercase, numbers, symbols), custom charsets, exact number of characters, and number of equal characters allowed in sequence.

Any details that you can remember about the passwords are useful, since this can greatly reduce scan time. A third possibility implies using a dictionary file and configuring brute force settings.

Furthermore, you can set the number of CPU-based processing threads or switch to auto mode as well as schedule an action to be performed automatically when the task is over, like playing and audio file, launching a script or web address. Password configuration rules can be saved to file and imported at a later time, depending on the complexity of the task.

Password search tasks vary, depending on the complexity of the keys. However, the software application remained light on system resources in our tests during this time. It comes bundled with an advanced set of rules for tracking down keys to password-protected Microsoft Access databases.