Thanks goodness for Hirens...

I was asked to tidy a oldish Dell laptop that a friend was allowed to keep when she resigned as a university lecturer. She wanted the specialist programs to stay on there as they could be useful if she gets more contracts to do work for the Uni, so any tidying had to take that into account.

I found the PC running slow and initially found that Sophos was taking a lot of resource so removed that. But it was still running slow and freezing for 30-60 seconds at times. I then thought it may be due to trying to in some way get to the university's domain so I changed it from domain to workgroup and then rebooted.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I couldn't login, password rejected. Tried various things, no joy. I then realised that perhaps the user credentials must in some way have been on the University's servers - though quite how the login worked when it was off-line I don't know.

Googling around I found quite a few hits on the problem, with few solutions. For a few minutes I thought I'd messed it up well and truly. Then one hit referred to Hirens...

So booted up and ran the password utility on Hirens. What a useful little tool . Was able to recover and reset passwords so all is back in working order now. And it's running much better.

Thank you Hirens

These types of bootable media are a must-have for any user. However, they can prove to be dangerous if used unwisely.