When in password hunting mode and having access to the filesystem of the target, most people would reach out to SAM and/or extracting cached credentials.
While this can usually be the way to go, it can pose a huge challenge, as the result can depend on the strength of the storage format of the password and the strength of the password itself.
Something often overlooked is hiberfil.sys and/or virtual machine snapshots or memory dumps, as they usually contain passwords in plain text.
When you have those, there’s no need for cracking at all and it doesn’t depend on password strength/size.