I have a pc at my small business. It is an old Dell with Windows XP professional. Upon boot up a screen always apears asking for a password. The user name is ADMINISTRATOR and when I press enter it takes me right in. This has been for the last 2 years. ok so it crashes yesterday. and when it boots back up it won't accept the blank password anymore. Since I never had it password protected I have no idea what to do. I even called the old owner and he said it never needed a password.
Can someone help?
Thanks
Laura
Hi,
Sorry to hear of the problems with your computer.
By routinely using an Administrator account you have left your computer vulnerable to hackers and the installation of undesirable elements.
You may be able to get into your system by Rebooting and at the log in screen holding down the CTRL key and simultaneously pressing on the ALT & DELete keys (you may have to do this rwice) from the options given log in as Administrator and at the password prompt press the RETurn key (you may have to do this twice).
This may get you in.
If it doesn't work then try and change the administrator account (using the same procedure but choosing a new password.
Regards
paws
The ctrl alt del is required on log in. and leaving the password blank as you suggest is the way I have always logged on. This no longer works. At one point it did say "loading your personal settings" then the ctrl alt del came up again and when I do that it requests the password.
I tried inputting a new password and this doesn't work.
Any other ideas?
Hi,
The next step is to see if you can get into your system via safe mode.
Reboot your machine, immediately after the BIOS loads, start tapping once per second on the F8 key, you will either get a keyboard error (in which case start all over again but start tapping the F8 key 2 seconds earlier than before) or you will get a menu, if this includes "last known good configuration" select this and see if it helps.
Regards
paws
Continues to do the same thing. I go to last good configuration and enter ..it appears to be loading my settings then the Box that request ctrl alt del comes up and that takes me back to the password screen.
any more suggestions?
Hi
This is not looking good.
Check the following before going further:
1 Has anyone had the opportunity to use your computer other than yourself? If so you need to quiz them as to if they have entered any paswords or typed in any passwords at any time or attempted to make any changes.
2 Have you tried to recall and use every password that you have entered previously remembering that upper case and lower case characters need to be exactly correct?
3 The next steps involve a fair bit of work, but I will set out the alternatives as I see them in no particular order of importance.
4 Check that your copies/back ups of all important data files/settings drivers etc are readly to hand, if they are not you will need to do this and the easist way is to remove your hard drive, change the jumper to "slave" and install it in another working computer and copy files accross. An alternative is to fit your hard drive in an external USB case or even just use a suitable cable (USB/IDE)
5 Reformat your hard drive (This will wipe everything and you will lose all your programmes, data, settings, files etc. and reinstall your operating system.
6 Use a parallel operating system E.G. boot into Linux and change/retrieve the password from there. This will need a bit of expertise on your behalf including an awareness of the limitations imposed if EFS (Encrypted File System if used on your system. (It's actually what we do for our customers who are in a similar prediciment to you. We do however make exhaustive enquiries, identity checks and validate the information by two independent means before we are willing to proceed.)
7 The following site on which I can give no guarantees offers a free password recovery service and takes approximately 48 to complete.
