My son has given me an old(ish) laptop running win7 but he’s forgotten the password. How can I get into the damn thing to reset it?

I recently bought a new PC with Win 7, set up everybodies accounts, set up my account giving myself admin previleges etc using a password I use for a couple of other things – must have typed it incorrectly twice and was locked out of admin privileges – d’oh! Tried a couple of simple things which didn’t work, in the end I used Trinity Rescue Kit

Walkthrough –

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsV4mzurr6U[/video]

Pretty easy to do, it worked.

Other obvious solution is to re-install Win 7

See of any of these will trigger his memory?

a favorite food?
your home or office address?
a frequently dialed telephone number?
something from your childhood?
a favorite number or set of numbers?
your name?
the name of a friend, family member, or pet?
a loved one’s birthday?
a combination of any of the above?

The password to get into Windows? you can’t but if it has a recovery partion you can reset it to factory defaults by pressing one of the F keys at startup. You will have to find out what laptop it is

I’ve used this at work to change local admin passwords before:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

It can reset the password to being blank on almost all common Windows versions unless the drive is encrypted. Take care as it uses a Linux boot CD and hacks the password database using a command prompt based tool. I’ve not managed it yet, but it is possible to completely screw things with it. 🙂

Going to look at the recovery partition option as cannot get in to system to use downloaded options. Yhanks for the help but I’m still stuck!

Going to look at the recovery partition option as cannot get in to system to use downloaded options. Yhanks for the help but I’m still stuck!

You don’t need to get into the system to use downloaded options, if you’ve got another pc you can use that.

Tell me more please Bimbler; I can’t access the desktop or use F8 system restore without password. Tried loading xp pro on instead but install says it can’t locate a hard drive, even though the laptop seems to work fine.

Sounds about right, IIRC a win7 partition will be a bit iffy for winXP to see.

As bimbler says you will need another machine to download the Trinity rescue kit

genghispod – Member
Tell me more please Bimbler; I can’t access the desktop or use F8 system restore without password. Tried loading xp pro on instead but install says it can’t locate a hard drive, even though the laptop seems to work fine.

Probably uses AHCI SATA, therefore F6 drivers are required, or changing SATA mode to IDE in the BIOS (but this makes the disk performance worse).

Tell me more please Bimbler

Watch the walkthrough and follow it step by step, you need to download Trinity Rescue Kit on a different PC, create a bootable USB/CD (you may have to go into the BIOS of the laptop in order to boot from USB) and away you go. It seems a bit hardcore and has I guess has the potential to mess things up but follow the guide and you can’t go wrong.

Other option find a Win 7 disc of the same flavour as already installed on the laptop and reinstall the OS – there should be a Win7 product key sticker on the laptop.