- Feb 3, 2016
- 173
- 5
- 18,715
Ok so my dad has had WAY too many PCs and has forgotten the password to his Alienware Laptop he sometimes uses for work. He is one of those people who has too many passwords and no concrete way to keep them organized so at some point he must have entered too many attempts because now his laptop just says he needs to go through the password resetting from Windows. When the hell did local PC user accounts turn into Windows accounts?
The issue I’m having as his tech support person is that for some unknown reason it appears that his user account name is an email address that not only doesn’t exist but it can’t exist! When you try to login in to the laptop it has this address as the user name and when you try and recover password it pulls up this same email but only the first few letters and asks you to complete it and it will then send it a password reset. The problem is that at some point it was entered incorrectly in the system, instead of (example email) bob.bob@gmail.com it put an underscore in instead of a dot bob_bob@gmail.com. Well Gmail can’t even use an underscore!
When we try to reset the account through the more involved Windows account recovery process it asks if there was an outlook account attached to the account which there was. I’m not sure why it assumes that you can’t access this outlook account from another device but it clearly does as it asks you to ask friends and family what the most recent emails you’ve sent and their topics have been. It wants you to enter these things into it and says it will get back to you.
We went to the outlook account on his desktop, which is the same outlook as on the other system, and actually sent some new emails that say TEST and TEST 2. These we entered in so we know they were the most resent emails sent. Yet when the email from Windows comes back it says we haven’t provided it with enough information. WTF? We weren’t sure if he had bought anything through the Windows store but we went ahead and entered the final 4 digits of the only credit card he would have used when it asked us to.
Why wasn’t this enough information?
Is the crazy nonexistent gmail address the issue and how can we resolve this if it is?
We have zero confidence that trying to call a person at Microsoft would yield any results.
Is there any advice you guys can give us?
‘Will I just have to reformat and lose what is on this system?
Thanks
The issue I’m having as his tech support person is that for some unknown reason it appears that his user account name is an email address that not only doesn’t exist but it can’t exist! When you try to login in to the laptop it has this address as the user name and when you try and recover password it pulls up this same email but only the first few letters and asks you to complete it and it will then send it a password reset. The problem is that at some point it was entered incorrectly in the system, instead of (example email) bob.bob@gmail.com it put an underscore in instead of a dot bob_bob@gmail.com. Well Gmail can’t even use an underscore!
When we try to reset the account through the more involved Windows account recovery process it asks if there was an outlook account attached to the account which there was. I’m not sure why it assumes that you can’t access this outlook account from another device but it clearly does as it asks you to ask friends and family what the most recent emails you’ve sent and their topics have been. It wants you to enter these things into it and says it will get back to you.
We went to the outlook account on his desktop, which is the same outlook as on the other system, and actually sent some new emails that say TEST and TEST 2. These we entered in so we know they were the most resent emails sent. Yet when the email from Windows comes back it says we haven’t provided it with enough information. WTF? We weren’t sure if he had bought anything through the Windows store but we went ahead and entered the final 4 digits of the only credit card he would have used when it asked us to.
Why wasn’t this enough information?
Is the crazy nonexistent gmail address the issue and how can we resolve this if it is?
We have zero confidence that trying to call a person at Microsoft would yield any results.
Is there any advice you guys can give us?
‘Will I just have to reformat and lose what is on this system?
Thanks
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