lost(?) passwords

hi y'all, got a problem... hp pav., windows xp media gave puter to kids while back, they pretty much ran it into the ground. i ran sys recovery this afternoon, it booted up, seem to run nice again. figured before i run all updates, gonna delete the crap/trial/spyware, do a reboot and then run updates. well... when it rebooted it popped a login window on me, already had HP_ADMINISTRATOR in the u/n, and I tried the p/w i'd always used, nothing, tried substituting my u/n for hpadmin, and my p/w, nothing, nothing no matter what i tried. i've googled and most all of the results i found seemed to be crapware... i'd sure appreciate a fix to this. thanks for reading...

 

Try starting in safe mode(F8 repeatedly at bootup) see if you get the Administrator account. It's password should still be unset so just hit enter. If that doesn't work try your p/w for the Administrator account.

From there you could create a new account with Admin privileges.

 

have you tried booting into Safe Mode to uninstall? Press F8 at the vendor, processor, BIOS info screen. this is an OBVIOUS question, but have you asked your kids what the password was?

note: if yours is older, you'll be out of service contract help & a reformat will lose you any "original" stuff that came installed. was only able to get install cd for my 6 year-old Dell's WinXP Home SP2 and not Works (which originally came with) or any of the other original programs...Dell said they were "trials." had to download the basic drivers before reformat & install so i could get back online for the rest of the things i needed (most current drivers, DirectX, Java, etc.)

was able to work around some things by installing free OpenOffice and Foxit pdf reader (recommend this instead of Adobe; it's only 3mb compared to 200+mb) so i didn't feel so cheated. rest of the stuff wasn't all that important, or was just bloatware, and you can get equivalents/replacements.

if you end up having to reinstall, i recommend doing a "clean" one. reformat (larger NTFS partition, NOT the smaller FAT/FAT32 partition), then install, AFTER you download your basic, needed drivers from HP's site. the drivers need to be saved on removable media like re-writable cd, flashdrive or external usb drive. install these after you get to your desktop. also, get instructions on driver install order & other how-to from HP's site.

 

thanks for your answers guys, appreciate it... ummm.... my 14 y/o came in and said, "just click OK w/ no p/w", that worked:-o

that's what i did cake, had 'em both save their music, then re-did from day one. learned one thing - am going to exercise my admin powers

again, thank you both for your time in response.

 

that's GREAT! LOL sometimes the most obvious is exactly what we forget when were stressed. i do it ALL the time.