I bought a laptop from a person off of craigslist.com… I met up with them, they showed me the laptop… Looked good and worked perfectly fine. Little did I know that they brought it already on (signed in) I took it home and played with it.Turned it off/logged off at night. When I turned it back on the following day I was prompted with a login password… The seller completely ripped me off!!! They never gave me a password for it and stupid me didn’t think about asking if it had any. They haven’t returned any of my calls of emails and I simply dont know what to do! Please help me!
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Steffy
You need to determine if there are BIOS or hard drive passwords ALSO in place. If so, then as was pointed out you have problems.
To determine that, watch the screens at start up for a clue telling you what keystroke/s are used to enter the setup. If you can’t even get into the BIOS screens because you are asked for a password then that means there is a BIOS password. You can’t change any settings in the BIOS that may be required to boot to a CD or flash drive, for instance.
Have you tried just hitting the enter key when prompted for an administrator password?
administrator password is not a bios password, it maybe that the restore has a password set,
best way to check is to use a linux disk see if it can install and format the disk, then buy a win7 dvd and install that.
otherwise you will need to call dell for the bios password reset
“then all you can do is get a windows xp/vista/win7 dvd and key and reinstall by doing a full advanced install, and formatting the whole drive.”
That will ONLY work if there is NO bios password set up.
If there is one set up, you may as well use the laptop as an anchor because even changing the HD will not work. You have to have Dell remove that password, that is the only way. It is a feature that deters thieves from stealing as they cannot use the laptop at all.
Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers
If factory restore doesnt work, then all you can do is get a windows xp/vista/win7 dvd and key and reinstall by doing a full advanced install, and formatting the whole drive.