i bought this old laptop at a yardsale, but the person left a password on the admin! im not very computer smart. Many friends tell me that this can be changed from the bios, i dont have any problem using the internet, or anything else, i just cannot download anything, any ideas on what to do?

I guess you mean you do not know the administrator password in windows? Are there any other accounts on the system that have admin rights? How are you logging on at the moment? What rights does that user have? You can find utils on the web where you can change passwords. http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm

Can you go back where you bought it and ask?

"Many friends tell me that this can be changed from the bios,"... If you are talking of the Administrator Account, in wind*ws. That's a NO Just wondering a couple of things. Is this XP Pro, or Home?? The user account, that you can log in with, does it have administrative rights/credentials?? If it does, just rest the the Admin password, from within it. All kinds of diff... ways. And alot of them already said ;-) Just to confirm, I did a Site Search << Click that, and you'll see what I mean. And as far as the downloading. It could just be a setting in IE, under Security. Good Luck, CrazyOne AAAHHH, I typed this, then got a phone call and didn't post it... But I will anyway, even if others have :-) Site Search..Site Search it's on your left of the screen ;-)

street1, I love it. I have no idea what's being attempted, but you answer should help. ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

First of all passwords are possible in many places. One is bios and one is the Administrator (if still named that) for the OS. There might be a whole host of passwords for other stuff on there. It would have been nice to have the original media though. There is an company that offers a floppy or a CD to boot to a dos shell. It runs a program to see all the passwords. (well, not in a fashion that you can read.) Email them the numbers and they claim to offer either same day for a fee or in a week for free.

All you need is chntpw UNIX is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, Windows is a shell, and DOS is a boot partition virus.