yungman said:
I actually wrote down what I did step by step so I can reference back in the future. I bought two more USB drives, I am going to repeat this with an old laptop I have. I am sure it's going to be a lot more simple as when power up, just hit ESC will do it instead of what I had gone through became of running the Ophcrack. I wonder how can I totally eliminate the power up login and all the steps on the laptop?
After your login, to eliminate the Windows User Account password, you can Navigate as follows:
Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Accounts > Change an Account > Change the password > Change password
If you click on the 'Change password' button at the lower right, without putting a value in the New password or Confirm new password fields, you'll make the User Account no longer password protected.
To eliminate the BIOS password, you can go to the Start Menu Screen, and hit F10 (BIOS Setup):
To do this you have to have the password in the first place. If you don't have it, you can hit Enter (or some other incorrect password)3 times and you'll get a 'halt code'. HP Customer Service can use that code to enable you to reset the password.
But you're not in that situation, because you have the password. There are 2 BIOS passwords: an Administrator password, and a Power-On password. To eliminate them, you'll need the Administrator password.
From the BIOS Settings Screen, go to the Security tab. From the Security Menu, select Power-On Password.
Do NOT select the Administrator password this time, because if you screw up the Power-On password, you can fix that with the Administrator password, but you can't fix a screwed-up Administrator password with the Power-On password.
Change the Power-On password to nothing, confirm that by putting nothing in the Confirm Password field, hit Enter and Save Changes. Then exit saving changes.
Verify that you don't get prompted for the Power-On password during startup.
Assuming that all goes well, you can then do the same for the Administrator password.
If you're not confident in something you just did, you can exit without saving changes, then go back in and select Restore BIOS Defaults. That too will remove the BIOS passwords, but it will also remove things like UEFI and boot device settings. If you contemplate doing that, please post again.
How do you know all these, where can I learn more about computers? Is it IT class or books?
For me, mostly its been manuals, technical articles, textbooks, utilities, problem-solving, experimentation, reading and writing code, and asking teasonably good questions.
I started when I was a pre-teen back in keypunch card days, and kept up with it, but you can attain a good deal of proficiency without such a set of advantages.
IT encompasses a very broad range of disciplines. You have make some decisions about what to focus on. Otherwise you can be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information.
I am retired, I was an EE and manager of EE before. I was here a few years back helping in EE part of Physics Forums for a while. But I am not that into computers. This make me think about learning more about PCs and laptops. I am the IT of the house...Me...IT! I usually know better not to get in trouble, but my big boss ( wife) is a different story. I ended up have to fix her laptop. This last episode started with she kept putting in the wrong password on her email and now the account keep kicking us out every two hours. She want a new email address, so I created a new account. Then I made the old account forward email to the new account to make it easy to set up the address book and everything else to transition to the new account. That's when I got this problem. I must have done something with my computer accidentally during the process to cause the password problem.
Do I need to learn C++ or C# to be good with IT?
It seems like you've had a great career and contributed a great deal. You don't need to be a programmer to be a good technician. It wouldn't hurt to learn a scripting language at least well enough to read and interpret and maybe tweak existing code. I think that C++ is a good thing to learn if you want to write full-scale software.
If you want to improve your Windows proficiency, I think that perhaps oddly enough, it would be helpful if you were to learn some Linux. Unlike MS-Windows, Linux doesn't overmediate and over-conceal its workings.
There is a great deal that you can learn about Windows, Linux and other IT matters, just by searching and reading, but you'll learn faster and more if you set up a 'sandbox' machine and start experimenting.
You could start by using the machine that you just rescued. A lightweight but not perfectly adequate precautionary safeguard would be to first create a restore point so that you can return to your current system state via running rstrui.exe if you hose something and are having trouble unhosing it:
How to Create a System Restore Point in Windows 7
- Choose Start→Control Panel→System and Security. ...
- Click the System Protection link in the left panel.
- In the System Properties dialog box that appears, click the System Protection tab and then click the Create button. ...
- Name the restore point, and click Create. ...
- Windows alerts you when the restore point is created.
To be safest, you should clone your internal HDD to an external USB HDD that is the same size or larger. Then if you have to you can boot from it and then clone from it onto the internal drive.
Play around conservatively with some of the utilities on the Hirens menu. If you can, you should stay away from BIOS settings if you're unsure about what they might do.
If you care to you can start experimenting with settings:
How to Create a Windows 7 System Settings Collection Folder
- Create a folder on the Windows 7 Desktop. Right-click on empty part of the desktop, then select New > Folder.
- Rename the folder. Rename folder name to: anyname.{ed7ba470-8e54-465e-825c-99712043e01c}
- Access the settings collection by double-clicking on the folder icon.
And please be sure to have some fun along the way.
! I got in so far, don't want to lose it!
☺