The eternal "I forgot my password!" thread..

Hey everyone.. my apologies for once again bombarding you with a question about a forgotten password. Please, let me explain the problem before you set me on fire.

My motherboard died on my old PC (from 5 years ago...) and being 3D/graphics artists, my husband and I decided to buy a new computer while we rebuild my old Alienware PC from 5 years ago (that was running XP).

We literally bought this machine, yesterday. It's our first time on Windows 7, so, while he's getting everything set up, he enters (what I figured would be) an easy password for us. Well, it wasn't so easy, because he apparently mistyped it so horrendously that now we can't retrieve it and are essentially locked out of a brand new PC.

So I went online and looked up ways to fix this, the most popular method being the whole "press F8 at start up, go into safe-mode..." ect.

Expect my computer won't do a damn thing when I hit F8. F12? Sure. I can do stuff from there, but safe mode doesn't appear to be an option.

Like I said, I'm new to Windows 7. So please forgive me, and if you could copy-paste an easy way to fix this without us needing to reformat the whole damn thing (after one day...) I'd really appreciate it.

hi Duchess, welcome to sevenforums,

try this tutorial: Password Reset

Thanks, dude. I will try this ASAP!

Ummm or not...

Now he's worried about this warning in the tutorial:

Making changes to the Windows Registry has the potential to disable the PC, if you have any concerns over using the information set forth here please feel free to post a question in this same tutorial and we will be glad to help.

Be Advised: if you use this method to reset you're user account password ANY / All access to encrypted files stored in the account will be lost.

..and wants to take it to the Geek Squad. x_x What do you guys think??

Did you encrypt any files - e.g. using truecrypt or similar?

If not , then that bit doesn't apply to you.

Awesome!!

But what about this?

Making changes to the Windows Registry has the potential to disable the PC, if you have any concerns over using the information set forth here please feel free to post a question in this same tutorial and we will be glad to help.

it's a valid warning, you do have the potential to mess things up when playing with the registry, but if you follow the instructions carefully, you shouldn't have any problems.

we're here to ask for more help if you need it. :)

It is done!! Thanks, guys! I am one happy dork!