Josh: Question
My user accounts on my laptop suddenly have passwords on them that I don’t know. I don’t know what to do short of a Windows reinstall. If you can help in any way it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer
I really don’t wish to alarm you, but if all user accounts have suddenly acquired passwords I cant think of any other way this could have been done, other than intentionally.

Can you still login under any of the accounts? If so as long as it has admin rights you should be able to change/remove passwords on all the other accounts. If not use another computer to look online for a copy of Hirens boot disk, you can find from any search engine, download, burn to a CD and you can boot from this and change account passwords.

Feel free to checkout our Windows security guide, if someone has accessed your computer from the web this is concerning if any other damage has been caused or if any files have been stolen

Be sure to checkout our other questions and answer pages

computer adviser questions answers 2 article