How many passwords are possible?

Question

A login password consists of four characters. The characters may be chosen from letters of the alphabet, numbers, or out of six special characters (#, %, _ , ! ,@ ,or *). The first character may NOT be a special character, nor may it be the numeral zero. The last character may not be one of the special characters. The letters are not case- (upper case A and lower case a mean the same thing).

Answer 1

# of choices of first letter: 35 possibilities (excludes 0 & 6 spec. char.)

# of choices in position 2: 42

# of choices in position 3: 42

# of choices in position 4: 36

 

Answer is the product of the four above numbers.

Answer 2

You don't specify if characters can be duplicated, so I'll assume they can be.  There are 42 different characters.

 

character 1:  35 possibilities

character 2:  42 possibilities

character 3:  42 possibilities

character 4:  36 possibilities

 

The number of possibilities is equal to 35x42x42x36.