amateur_professional Posted May 26, 2009 Report Share Posted May 26, 2009 To start things off, I'm not one for forums usually so bare with me.So the other day the girlfriend's son was given a somewhat old dell desktop (maybe 2 yrs old) as a total freebie, and it appears to have been wiped of anything personal with the lone exception that the default account the system logs into automaticaly at startup is a limited access user account, and it appears to have been severely restricted at that. If I boot in safe mode, I can select the admin acct., but it is password protected and doesnt give any hint so I can even begin to guess what it might be, I've tried anything obvious i can think of, "password," "admin," etc but all in vain. To make things more challenging, the original owner is out of the question, friend of a friend thing, teenage boy got it from teacher on last day of school, who got it from his brother, who pretty much forgot about it for a year or so, new laptop. I was thinking i could just wipe it and reformat it but I dont have the current activation key, the sticker on it is for xp home and its got xp pro sp3 installed, I have a program that, lets just say isn't probably authorized by MS, that i can use to view the current key but User restrictions block their usage. i have legitemate intentions so its not like i'm trying to pirate. I just want to reinstall it on the same machine, and to my knowledge its a legit copy, so again keeping legal intentLong story short, I'm just looking to either reset the admin password so I can restore full access so the kid can actually use the comp, or come up with a way i can retrieve the key thats on it so i can just wipe and reinstall. I know the obvious solution is just install Hope and use the key on the case, but i'm kinda picky and personally i'd rather use Pro than home, too many unnecessary background services and such.As my handle would suggest, i'm pretty experienced but i'm entirely self taught so i'll openly admit i'm not an expert. Basically try to keep it in something that kinda resembles plain english, please:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doug Posted May 26, 2009 Report Share Posted May 26, 2009 Even so it is against the Policy of the Forum to have any dealings on Password related issues. I am locking this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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