I was helping a friend today set up his Windows 8 laptop. He is an inexperienced computer user. He had somebody else start the set up for him a few months prior. Now, when I start up his laptop it asks me for a password. Of course, my friend doesn’t remember the password that the other person set up. I contacted the other person and they didn’t remember the password used either.
So, it did show the correct email address for my friend on the log in screen which implied that a password was set up. Being fairly new to Windows 8, I didn’t see any option to reset the password so I thought I might be hooped and have to re-install the whole operating system. This would have been a problem because the operating system came pre-installed on the laptop and I had no compact discs and no software keys.
So, I began trying a bunch of possible passwords that my friend may have used. None of them worked! Then, out of the blue, a message appeared that said the password could be reset at: account.live.com/password/reset . So, I went to this page and selected ‘I forgot my password’, then clicked Next. Then I had to enter some characters to prove that I was a human. Then, it asked me to confirm my friend’s email address. It sent an email to my friend’s email account. He told me the CODE to enter onto the screen. I entered the code and it let me create a new password.
Then, I proceeded to log in to the laptop using the new password and it worked! I was at the main Windows 8 screen!
I am just documenting this so if others have problems logging onto Windows 8 this might help them out.