A few other items of interest with passware (in my case the forensic edition).
1. Passware tends to throw a lot of "processor utilization time" behind a cracking effort process.
I have a new PC with an i7-4770K in it.
I noticed the CPU temp was rising during the cracking effort, because I was using the stock intel CPU heatsink & fan assembly.
Granted, intel throws a pitifully basic aluminum heatsink and a basic fan at you, for your CPU's"cooling unit". (At least compared to the nice heatpipe cooling units that AMD provides as their "OEM" cooling unit assembly with their 6-core and 8-core CPUs).
I replaced the intel OEM cooler with a large "Cooler master V8" cooling unit.
Afterward the CPU temp remained low the vast majority of the time.
2. I don't know the limit to the number of simultaneous jobs you can run together at one time.
I have run 2, occasionally 3, jobs in parallel for passwords that I knew needed to be Brute forced.
When you open a new instance of passware, if one is already running, you receive a pop up stating the passware program is already running.
Then you are asked if you want to "start a new job".
You just affirm YES to the pop up and a new job is started.
Note: 2 or 3 jobs are about all I ever ran at one time.
The CPU tends to want to come close to hitting 100% utilization with 2 jobs.
With 3 jobs it does hit 100% and tends to stay there.
There are ways to limit the CPU utilization by downgrading the CPU thread's "priority" in Task mgr. Or just start each separate passware process with low priorities.
3. Batch jobs - if you have a large group of files to crack, you can have passware "search for protected files".
Then from the resulting list you can highlight the files you want to decrypt.
You are told beside each protected file that passware finds whether it is an "Instant Unprotection", like a PDF with a 40-bit encryption password.
Or whether an unknown password appears to require a "Brute force" attack.
Based on those results you could pick all the easy ones first, as in all of
the "instant unprotection" files.
Or choose all the harder "brute force" files. Then walk away and let passware just do it's thing.
Either way, passware processes each file in your list, one after another, until it finishes.
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