Win98 issue or dumb blonde?

J

Jahya

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Ok, I don't know the full details yet, so this post may be a bit premature...

Here is the problem described to me by a co-worker who wants me to fix her $h!t. She says all was well as of yesterday morning when she left for work, but when she got home Windows was locked up (not out of the ordinary for 98 -- my g/f's comp does this all the time if powersave options are enabled). She says she rebooted and when it came back up it asked her for user/pass. She never had a logon set up before as it is a single user pc. When she tried to cancel out of it, Windows said she needed to create a new user name and password, so she did. When she got logged on, all of her programs were gone. If my understanding is correct, everything but Windows itself is gone. She was not connected to the internet at all when all this went down so she wasn't hacked.

Could this be a logon issue? If so, how would one go about retrieving the original logon info (especially since technically there was none)?

She's supposed to call me when I get home tonight, but I'm feeling seriously Win98 retarded b/c I haven't used it in so long. Another issue is, most likely she has not gotten any Windows updates since she got the computer. I just found out about 2 weeks ago that she had never defragged her puter since she got it and had her take care of that. She said it took almost 9 hours to complete. So obviously, I'm dealing with someone who does not maintain their computer (and barely has a clue what she is doing with it). Any help, thoughts, suggestions, snide comments, etc are welcome and will be greatly appreciated....well, except for the snide comments :p

Hopefully I can get this all worked out over the phone b/c she lives way too far away for me to make a housecall (about 30 miles highway and another 20 into the sticks), especially since there's nothing in it for me and even if she offered payment in sex, I wouldn't fv<k her with a stolen d!<k.

The system is a Gateway 2000, Celeron 650(?)mhz, 128 meg ram, 20 gig hd w/ no partitions.
 
Hmm... well then Jahya, there is only one thing i can think of. If you are familiar with any kind of network settings, there are some where the computer will not show anything for a brand new account unless they want it to be shown. Chances are that when Windows 98 (......bleh) was installed, it may have been set up with an administrator account by itself, but didn't have to log on. maybe a setting was altered to turn on the logon process or something. If that is the case, and she never had to set up any passwords or anything, maybe you could have the person try to log on with the user name as Administrator and no password.
 
She sounds like an average user to me. Some of the sub-average user are really scary, trust me!

This sounds like the reboot at the end of the Win98 installation when the system asks you to create a user account if I remember it right. So if the system got reinstalled for some reason (recovery disc in CD-drive?) that could explain the login as well as the missing programs.

But why a recovery disc would recover without user input is beyond me...
 
maybe the company that made the computer set the disc up that way. not sure. but if it's Windows XP pro, i think you always have to set up an account on the computer when it finishes installing and you go through and set up the time and everything else.
 
Well, this is what I know now. She says she checked a box that said something to the effect of "Login as a new user each time windows is started" but she does not remember where she did this and I don't recall ever coming across that option in Win98, but I haven't really messed with 98 since I installed for my g/f over a year ago. Anyone know what this is and even better, know how to disable it?

Also, we were able to track down her profile, she is listed as Default. She never set up a password for this profile, but now it requires one. She tried all the passwords she would normally use and none worked. Is there a way to retrieve the password?
 

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