I bought a pc at an auction and it has Win 2000 on it and it is password protected, is there a way to clear it or am I just going to have to format and begin again with it. I don't want to break any laws.
You can always try the guest account-otherwise, there is no way to clear the account, so a format is necessary. You can legally buy media for the OS and not pay for a license, or have a disk for it used, as in buying the system you legally acquired an OS license.
You beat me to it... It's a tad difficult to use the first time around, but it's pretty easy to use. Alternatively, you can use a program called SAMinside but it costs money. If ntpasswd doesn't work, then I would try and see if you can find a trial version of SAMinside. And if all else fails, there's also the incredibly fun FDISK.
that's just plain wrong. You can install over it with a fresh 2K copy if you can't do the above ways, which both work.
