you can't get the password without ownership, sorry

The older couple need to contact Dell and transfer ownership to you.

it's technically not a door stop if it's only the admin password and not the power-on password ...    only part i don't like about this is that it's very rare for a home user to set the admin password and nothing else...

Look at this way. Be glad you talked them down. Otherwise you would have a $300 door stop instead of a $150 one.

Yeah and the part about "They moved out of town". Which I guess could happen. I don't know about anyone else but whenever I buy a PC the first thing I do is go into the BIOS. About the only time I didn't do that was with my i8200 when I first got it, first powered it on, but once I had run through all the setup stuff I rebooted and went into the BIOS.

Oh, I think Ed and I both know things you could do ...  you mind posting the service tag?

I didn't think of checking the bios.....I just made sure it worked and turned on.......It's only when I went home and pressed f2 and got a password...that's where I'm stuck......So basically there's nothing I can do....I'm just pretty much stuck....

service tag should be on the bottom

At the the bottom it says Service Tag: WHATEVER THE NUMBER IS.

I think if the person who claims ownership of it can provide details such as service tag, and details of where he bought it from, he might be able to gain a bit of 'momentum' to this debate~

I'm pretty sure with a bit more effort though that person could also find out where the people moved to- surely they left a forwarding address because if they can have a garage sale, they must've being quite well settled in and had a lot of posessions, and usually that means they've gotten the money somehow and there must've being people sending things to them (friends, family, business), and surely they must've left a forward-to address or a forward-to phone number?

Bought My 1100 on Ebay. Had it for six months working fine. Great unit. No problems.

Quicker than my 850 desktop in my wireless home network.

Took a trip to Korea. Fired it up when I got to Soel. It wanted the "Authentication" password. Fist time for that.

I don't know if the x-ray scanners messed it up or if maybe a short on/off cycle did it.

Any ideas?

Couldn't remember and lost the notes from the seller. Emailed him. He said he sold the unit for a friend who left the country. Yikes!

Called Dell customer service. Talked to a real nice customer service person Lorain. Gave her all my info. Said she would take care of it? Still waiting for e-mail or snailmail to get my system up again.

Maybe slow response because of the holidays.

Speaking of which....

Merry Christmas and Happy new Year to All !!

 

I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens- please tell us how it goes.