Saturday, July 30, 2011 — What a damn day its been here in my shack! I decided to move my “new-to-me” Dell PC into the shack now that the monitor situation is taken care of. Easier said than done (as most things are in my shack).
First I had to clean out the area for the computer to sit. That wasn’t too hard, but snaking the cables from the shelves I built on top of the corner desk down behind it to where the PC will sit was another matter. The corner desk has a “back” that connects the middle leg that goes into the corner. This back goes down almost to the floor; I ended giving my son a tape measure and had him crawl under the desk and extend the tape upward until I could see it and snag it. That sounds convoluted, but it worked!
Fast forward here … got everything hooked up and the PC worked GREAT! Running XP Professional Service Pack 3, its ready to rock and roll! But wait … no Internet!
I installed a wireless USB LAN adapter, but it wouldn’t work; I finally went into the networking stuff and renamed the PC and removed the domain setting that it had set … BAD, BAD MOVE!
When the PC rebooted, it now came up with a login box with a name of a user and a blank box for the password. What password?? Crap! I’ve tried to get past this every way I can find — even tried Safe Mode; nothing doing. This sucks sooo bad, too, because the PC works great!
I’ve downloaded a program that’s supposed to let you recover a Windows login, but first you have to make a boot CD; that’s the next thing I need to do, just need time to mess with it.
I sent out an SOS to my nephew, who is an IT guru for a major company; he’ll know how to get this taken care of if I can wait to hear back from him. I could always wipe the hard drive and reinstall … however I really don’t want to do that — it has a great install already in place.
The software I downloaded actually works — it showed me the passwords for my own PC as well as product keys … pretty neat! There’s a guy whose put together a Linux program that does basically the same thing. I’m not much on Linux, so we’ll see how it goes otherwise. Wish me luck!
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