I came into possession of a relatively brand new laptop last night, but i cant get it going because i dont know the password........id be really greatful if someone could tell me what to do.....when i turn it on i get a black screen with a small blue box saying 'enter password'

aaah I bios password. Best way to do it is break out the tool box open the laptop up and pull the Bios batery. This is no small feet on a laptop since the are notorios for getting back together. Also after you detach the battery you could have to wait 48hrs before the capacitor disapates.

There are ways to discharge the capacitor. BUt I have never had the stomach to perform the operation.

Also I moved this post to a relevant topic

huh that´s the very last option i´d recommend, i did screw up my box by unpluggin the cmos battery overnight to get rid of that nasty "DeppFreeze" thingie discussed somewhere else in the Forum...
chances are ya got a Toshiba lappy or some very close clone of those ( yes they do tend to use similar or even equal BIOS´es ) so there´s a solution here and some general information that´s very clearly written imho can be found here
HTH

Of course, under the right circumstances, you could call the vendor and ask for the master bios password that would allow you to get in and erase that password. Or get a friend who works in IT to do it for you, again, under the right cir's.

And also, you could search google for "bios cracker". There's a number of them out there.

I assume you already tried all the "usual" passwords?

I can second the bios battery is tough to remove on a laptop. Had to do it once and it took about 3 hours to remove all the parts (including the screen on this version, which I believe it was a Toshiba) and put them back. I had to get someone else to put it back together

man just try to log in using this username
username=administrator
password=

thats it u put administrator as username and press enter without putting a password i enter in that way when i lost my pass in windows 2000 it should work in XP if that is what u got

There is BIOS cracking utilities if you do not want to unscrew your puter and might not get all the parts togehter (Some people tend to do that..).
www.astalavista.com has BIOS hacks/cracks I think...
Use google.com to find anything on "BIOS <whatever version> crack" or similar.

Attention: It might affect your system severely in some rather negative ways if you do not know what you're doing!

Go to the vendor's website and verify that there is no "jumper" for resetting the BIOS password. See if you can't call their support and get them to help you.

BUT - this could also be the infamous hard drive encryption in which case you should try to boot up onto another medium like a CD or floppy (knoppix is my favorite) and then format the hard drive.

Enjoy!

--j