Did you read the threads that were linked in #3 here?

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Sorry. I thought you were referring to a BIOS password. There will be a place to set the boot options. Perhaps if you tell us what options you see... Life's more painless for the brainless.

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Resonse#7 My comment stands - but AFTER I wrote that, I followed the 2nd of the 3 URLs (the more likely one) and sure enough I discovered that I could get access to the boot sequence in BIOS and as a result, that PC is now running WinXP ! Thank you VERY much. Basty

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"In case it matters, it's a desktop, not a laptop." I assumed the computer you were talking about is the one in specs in your first post, and was fairly recent (I missed the 700mhz). Most Net Vistas these days are laptops. You should have stated the model number in the first post. IBM has been using the Net Vista name for a long time, and IBM/Lenovo is still using it. "Response #4 - 'password jumper' - is that an item on the motherboard ? The jumpers on the HDD are for setting whether or not slave, master, cable select, as far as I know." Most desktop mboards have a jumper, usualy labelled on the mboard and named in your mboard manual Clear Cmos or similar, you can move to two different pins of three, or off of or onto two pins, to clear the settings made by the user in the cmos part of the bios chip; when you move the jumper back to it's original position your bios is set to default settings. Some don't have a jumper or pins for that, but have solder dots where pins would normally be, and you short the two dots, or certain dots of three, to each other for a short time to remove the cmos contents. Some mboards additionally have another jumper, usually labelled Password or similar, usually close to the Clear Cmos jumper, you can similarly move to clear only the passwords, but that is not common. Both jumpers are usually close to the bios chip. You are supposed to wait a minimum time before you move a jumper back to it's original position in order to give the contents a chance of clearing completely - e.g. at least 5 minutes. In any case, it is recomended you unplug the computer or remove the AC power to it so the contents you want to clear, clear faster. Any computer PS has large capacitors that can store charge for awhile after the computer is off, and ATX PSs are always powering the mboard in some places as long as there is live AC to the PS - both those things can delay clearing the cmos or password. What would be the point of having a jumper on the hard drive that you could remove to remove a password? - it would be too easy to do so. Obviously it is easy to remove a password or clear the cmos on most desktop computers - that isn't the case for more recent laptop computers.

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