I am in a bit of a quagmire! I have recently purchase a laptop form the eBay
site and have been using it like a dream. There were some settings that I was
playing around with today taking it out of a network, making it workstation
only. This seemed like a great idea to me and I checked it, went n to do a
few more setting changes, which forced a re-boot. When the system rebooted,
my user credentials were no longer valid. I am trying to get in touch with
the seller on eBay, but with little success at this point.

My question: Can the USERID/Password for the Admin user be reset to a
default or is there a windows default for the administrator user when the
application is installed? Please help me! My research paper is due today? And
you guessed it , the laptop has the only copy of thepaper and

SOSGuyInTexas wrote:

> I am in a bit of a quagmire! I have recently purchase a laptop form
> the eBay site and have been using it like a dream. There were some
> settings that I was playing around with today taking it out of a
> network, making it workstation only. This seemed like a great idea to
> me and I checked it, went n to do a few more setting changes, which
> forced a re-boot. When the system rebooted, my user credentials were
> no longer valid. I am trying to get in touch with the seller on eBay,
> but with little success at this point.
>
> My question: Can the USERID/Password for the Admin user be reset to a
> default or is there a windows default for the administrator user when
> the application is installed? Please help me! My research paper is due
> today? And you guessed it , the laptop has the only copy of thepaper
> and

Unfortunately, you removed the computer from the domain (where it really
didn't belong anyway) and so you now need a local (this computer) user.
Boot with the NTpasswd program and change the local Administrator
password to a blank. Then log into that account and make a new local
user account, copy over whatever data you need, etc. You will need to
log into any new account one time before you can copy data to it.

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

Copy a User Account -
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=811151

It should be noted, however, that best practices are to format and
clean-install the operating system on any second-hand machine. When you
bought the computer, you should have received disks for the operating
system, any programs that came preinstalled on the computer, and
possibly for drivers (or at least a Recovery Disk). If you did not get
these things, then the second-hand laptop was not a bargain and you
will need to buy XP and get drivers from the laptop mftr.'s website.

Malke
--
MS-MVP Windows User/Shell
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic"