I wanted to add a new user to my laptop so my friend's daughter could log-in without accessing my files.
I went to User accounts > Add or remove user accounts. I was asked to use a Microsoft Account. My friend's daughter is 9 years old so clearly does not have her own Microsoft Account. I was then prompted to 'create an email' and given the example 'anything@anything.com'. This seemed strange but I went ahead and created a new email address for my friend's daughter, who I will call Emma. The email address was basically Emma@emma.com. I was then asked for a password so I entered a password. But I was never asked to re-enter the password. I clicked through to the next screen where I was asked to verify the email address by going to the email account and clicking the verification link. I obviously couldn't do that because I had only just made up the email.
I assumed I would need to find another way to add a user so went back to the beginning. I then saw an option to add a 'local user', which is what I had wanted all along. So I created a local user called 'Emma'. This time I WAS asked to enter the password twice. However, bizarrely. The administrator was now set to 'emma@emma.com' rather than my old admin log-in.
I logged out to see if the new (local) 'Emma' Account worked correctly (it did) but when I tried to log back in to the admin account my password didn't work. As I had not been asked to re-enter the password on set-up there must have been a typo. I entered the password incorrectly so many times that I was locked out. I contacted Microsoft support but the only help they really offered (after several hours of online chats) was to complete the password recovery form. I did that 3 or 4 times but the problem is that the form asks several security questions (name, date of birth, etc) which I was never asked when accidentally setting up this new admin account do I cannot prove I am who I say I am.
The final answer from Microsoft is that in order to use my computer again as an administrator I will need to re-build it thus losing all of my files.
I am amazed that it was so easy for me to accidentally lock myself out of my computer in this way and that there appears to be no way to fix it.
Any ideas?
I went to User accounts > Add or remove user accounts. I was asked to use a Microsoft Account. My friend's daughter is 9 years old so clearly does not have her own Microsoft Account. I was then prompted to 'create an email' and given the example 'anything@anything.com'. This seemed strange but I went ahead and created a new email address for my friend's daughter, who I will call Emma. The email address was basically Emma@emma.com. I was then asked for a password so I entered a password. But I was never asked to re-enter the password. I clicked through to the next screen where I was asked to verify the email address by going to the email account and clicking the verification link. I obviously couldn't do that because I had only just made up the email.
I assumed I would need to find another way to add a user so went back to the beginning. I then saw an option to add a 'local user', which is what I had wanted all along. So I created a local user called 'Emma'. This time I WAS asked to enter the password twice. However, bizarrely. The administrator was now set to 'emma@emma.com' rather than my old admin log-in.
I logged out to see if the new (local) 'Emma' Account worked correctly (it did) but when I tried to log back in to the admin account my password didn't work. As I had not been asked to re-enter the password on set-up there must have been a typo. I entered the password incorrectly so many times that I was locked out. I contacted Microsoft support but the only help they really offered (after several hours of online chats) was to complete the password recovery form. I did that 3 or 4 times but the problem is that the form asks several security questions (name, date of birth, etc) which I was never asked when accidentally setting up this new admin account do I cannot prove I am who I say I am.
The final answer from Microsoft is that in order to use my computer again as an administrator I will need to re-build it thus losing all of my files.
I am amazed that it was so easy for me to accidentally lock myself out of my computer in this way and that there appears to be no way to fix it.
Any ideas?
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