Locked out, cannot enter password

Please help! I am locked out of my Acer Aspire 7735Z-4613. When I turn on the home screen it will not let me enter the password for the computer. The password bar will not light up and the cursor does not appear. What should I do?

 

When you say the password for the computer, do you mean the password for your Windows account? Or is there an administrator password that must be entered before you get to the Windows user login screen? If you mean the Windows user password then there should be a hint that you would have left as a reminder of the password, if not then I think the only option is to reinstall Windows. However, if it's an administrator password for the computer which appears on startup then I have no idea if there is a way to get round it.

 

Yes, it is the administrator password on the actual computer.

 

I don't know if this is the right answer. Some years ago, one desktop in the office was giving an error on the admin password and no one could hack it. What the tech did was to take off the CMOS battery (it is a flat battery like a silver coin) and then inserted it again. When the desktop was restarted, it asked for the date and time and the settings were back to the initial version. I just don't know if that would work in laptops.

 

Thank you. I will try that.

 

This is worth a try, as it should reset the BIOS settings which is where the administrator password will be stored. It's not guaranteed though. I've had the same problem before with one computer I had and this didn't work. I do think that might be down to the individual computer though. Taking the CMOS battery out for a while is usually a good way of working round a few different problems with startup.

 

Have you tried booting the computer in Safe Mode? If you are able to do so, you might be able to reset the computer to factory settings. That happened to me when I had an Acer Aspire One Netbook, and that is what I had to do in order to reset the password.

 

I suppose if the password memory cannot activate, this could be a sign of infectious malware which needs to be debugged. If you have a password reset disk, the recovery should be easy but if its burned by a third party, you can make use of the Windows Genius administrator. There are other methods though but I find this reliable for my case nonetheless.