Question Password recovery Win 7 Home Premium

[Perplexed50]

Hi all, I recently reformatted the hard drive on a HP Pavilion Elite desktop. It's an old one of mine which my grandson uses . It was running excruciatingly slowly. My grandson is 13 and I have no idea what he might be downloading so I was hoping it would be as (relatively) simple as finding malware. I checked for viruses and malware, couldn't locate any and then thought I would reformat the hard drive. I don't have install discs because the PC came with recovery options on a separate recovery partition. Anyhow, it all worked well I thought and I've used it for a couple of days, mainly to surf the internet to make sure it's faster than it was previously. It was running Win 10 but when it was reformatted it went back to its original specifications which was running Win 7 Home Premium.

Today, when I went in to download a couple more of his Steam games before passing it back to him, I find I can't get through the user id/password screen. It says the user name or password is incorrect. I did rename the machine to his name as I wasn't planning to keep it here.

I have googled and tried F8 with safe mode and command prompt as a few sites suggested I should be able to see the password that way. But that just loads all the drivers etc and then drops back to the sign in splash screen. There are a number of sites selling password recovery software but I'm not at that point yet I don't think.

Should I just reformat it again?

I have 2 other PCs at my place running Win10. Can I use one of them to create a bootable disk for the Win 7 machine?

Assistance in working this out appreciated. Anne

 

[ex_bubblehead]

...Should I just reformat it again?....

That's precisely what you should do. We do not assist with passwords here as we have no way to verify that you are either the owner or otherwise authorized to access the system.