Urgent help needed with PC password - practical joke gone wrong?

kwikbreaks

I'd be more inclined to suspect Alzheimers or alcohol than teenage sabotage...

daska

LOL Very unlikely to be alzheimers, he's just finished a PhD! And while he has faults, alcohol isn't one of them. And it would be totally out of character for him to apply a password on his pc, let alone to not use one of his standard passwords.

DSD has been threatened with having to move back to her mum's, cue slamming doors and screaming fits, 17 going on 2...

System

I would have offered £100 to guess the password, then gone mental when it was "guessed" at the first attempt!!

Jox

I have a Dell laptop from work and it kept switching off so I took it to be repaired and since then wasn't able to log on.

I contacted Dell who charged £69 to wipe everything and reset the password.

I didn't need to use the laptop for a few months but when I went to log on again the password didn't work!

I had written the password down somewhere safe so I definitely had the right info.

*Sigh* very annoying! I'm sending it to my IT department to try to sort it out

daska

That's bizarre. As a family we don't password protect our PCs, laptops and accounts etc yes but not PCs because we all use all of them as and when we need/want - with the exception of this one which as I say wasn't even cabled up to a monitor or power! (I'm very close to my ex's family). Is it possible that this could have happened without human intervention!?!?

kwikbreaks

daska wrote: »

Is it possible that this could have happened without human intervention!?!?

Now let me consider a moment...
Hmmm...

Have you seen any petunias materialising nearby?
Has a giant whale crash landed in your garden?

No?

That seems to rule out the Infinite Improbability Drive being in use in your neighbourhood which would be the only possible way a PC with no password could gain one along with a hint without human intervention.

I still suspect this was done by the owner and they've since forgotten doing it. Not alcohol you say - how about other recreational chemicals.

daska

Not for many years now

As I said earlier it's entirely out of character. He simply wouldn't have thought to do it and if I'd suggested it he'd have poo-poo'd it as being unnecessary and a pain. And if he had done it he would have used one of a small number of passwords that I know but the kids don't (I am still his first port of call on IT matters but I was a test manager rather than a techie)

kwikbreaks

Well I guess you know your relations. It seems to be a very hit and miss joke to put a password on an unused machine that quite likely would never have been used again under normal circumstances.

Anyhow a solution to resetting the password was posted way back albeit too late to be of any use so I guess that's the end of this sorry tale which sounds like it has soured relationships.

daska

I'd really have to go into a very long explanation to give anyone here an understanding. Suffice to say that it's a combination of a restricted field, the recession and health issues. In the normal run of things I suspect this would have been discovered within a month or so but a complete dearth of specialist work in our area meant that it wasn't. Hey ho!

BigRonW

Methinks that an important lesson is being missed here. Impatience led to a perfectly acceptable solution being made irrelevant.... but so what? A "Software toolkit"is thereby demonstrated to be "something you need when you need it". I used to carry a copy of Hiren's boot CD around on a business-card-shaped 8cm CD, in my wallet. These days, I carry a newer version around on a bootable USB "Pen drive", that I keep attached to my keys. Google Hiren's, download it TODAY, and keep it handy for when you DO need it. It's a collection of dozens of small programs on a bootable CD (or Pendrive) which will aid in the fixing of almost ANY PC problem - like, in this case, removing a password. My neice went even further off the rails than the average teenager, and kept her PC password protected. Then, when throwing a tantrum, she kicked-in the facia of the system box, and I was asked to fix it. Her Dad passed it over, and aked me to fix it (and several other problems) without realising that it was "locked." She was quite surprised to get the system back... with ALL of the passwords removed. The time to "gather usefull tools" is NOT 30 seconds before you urgently need to use them.