Just bought a laptop from a lovely old lady in Craigslist... Made the psw to the admin account abc123... Did a reset/restore on Windows 10 and now it's back to Windows 8 and it doesn't recognize my psw.

How do I get back in?!? Is this a fluke or some scam I wasn't aware of?? Any help is appreciated

You bought a laptop with Win 10 on it...set an admin password...then did a reset to Windows 8?

This post was edited by Ghot on Jul 24 2016 04:08am

Yep! lol couldn't delete her old user info until I made one. Only reason I did. Figured that psw wouldn't cause any problems. Just wanted to start new, upgrade to 10 again and change all the privacy nightmare settings from default instead of checking every setting

That's a tough one. I would think the fastest answer would be directly from Microsoft chat...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus/

Argh I was hoping you wouldn't say that. Haha I haven't dealt with Microsoft directly since Windows 2000 and I can't imagine they're any better now than before

I have. You're not really doing anything illegal.

I guess you could Google: Remove Windows 8 admin password

Oh man. I've been trying reset and didn't even think about simply removing it. I'll try that and if that doesnt work, I'll sit on hold for Microsoft for most of the day.

Guess laptop had w8, upgraded to w10. The moment you uninstalled / resetted w10 its only normal to go to w8.

If the laptop has a bios pw => remove cmos battery (involves opening it up - not guaranteed to do it) or, depending on the laptop maker, bios could have a "safe" code that once introduced will let you override bios pw.
Or Hiren's BootCD. Or directly call the lady that sold it.

If the laptop only has a windows pass => ez mode => bios => main boot : cd drive => plug into the cd a w7/8/8.1 setup cd and reinstall windows.
Or call the lady.

It is possible for the laptop to have a hidden sector/partition/drive/ss for windows and root files => that can either overcomplicate or simplify it. Pm if this is the case. Nn write a story here

The latest Hirens boot CD may be able to reset the password
Not 100% sure about Win 8 but definitely win 7

The fuck do you need to reset any passwords for?


Just reset the PC again. Put in a win8 CD (depending on how old/new your pc is you wont even need to do this) and boot from CD.

You'll get windows recovery options/UEFI settings/troubleshooting options. You want to reset the PC completely. Most PC's nowadays have their windows installation files on a seperate partition taken from your main HD space (ie you have a 500gb hd but only 490GB is usable as with windows 8+(maybe 7) windows sets aside and formats a small portion of your HD with windows so that you don't ever need a CD to install it.

tl;dr there is NO such thing as a windows computer with a password that is not completely removable in some way. Microsoft is smart enough to know that if someone has your hardware the best password in the world is not going to slightly hinder having that shit completely gutted.
Atleast to that point, if you haven't encrypted your info, encrypted any access to your computer ( you can encrypt your PC so that on wake it black screens until a certain combination is typed/password is correctly given) or taken proper measures to keep your hardware safe, it is really trivial to access protected computers.



HINT: You can do this all on command prompt in 5 minutes.

This post was edited by Zekey4 on Jul 25 2016 02:49am