[PCTECH] Gateway Technical Support

["Chuck Lewis" <clewis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I was going to hold off on this, but this is too good. I have one of our top
salespersons that has been having problems with his personal Gateway
Notebook.

 

So I took a look at it and it was acting up all right. So I emailed the
following to Gateway Tech Support:

 

Computer WAS booting up and saying no OS was found. So I put the Gateway
Operating System CD in and rebooted expecting to be 

prompted for an installation but  after a while it came up prompting me for
my password and started up fine.

 

Played around with it a little bit and it seemed very "sluggish". I
downloaded, installed and ran AdAware and found and removed a bunch of 

stuff. Also loaded our antivirus software but had trouble getting that to
complete and that concerned me. I eventually got it to install and 

run OK with nothing found.

 

So I ran Windows Update and it found nothing needing updating which seems
unusual. SP2 was installed about a month ago and I KNOW there have been
critical updates since then (?). Upon rebooting it goes looking for a DHCP
server. Normally I've seen this when I disk drive is not found so I was
expecting this on this notebook. But after a while it boots up and prompts
me for a password. Weird - could this be a controller card issue ?

 

I booted up in Safe Mode with Command Prompt and am running the antivirus
software from there to be SURE.

 

Any ideas ?

 

Thanks !

 

Chuck

 

And here is what I got back:

 

Thank you for using Gateway's Online E-mail Support.  I understand that 

you have a password in your system.  I suggest you to boot in safe mode 

and delete the password.  Here are the steps to help you do this steps. 

 

Please perform the following steps to test the computer in Safe Mode:

 

1.  From the Start menu, click Turn Off Computer.

 

2.  In the Turn Off Computer dialog box, click Restart.

 

3.  Repeatedly tap the F8 key after the Gateway BIOS logo appears until 

the Windows Advanced Options Menu appears.

 

4.  In the Windows Advanced Options Menu, use the arrow keys to move to 

Safe Mode, and then press the ENTER key.

 

5.  After logging into Windows XP Safe Mode, in the Desktop dialog box, 

click Yes.

 

After booting up in safe mode, here are the steps to delete password. 

 

1. Click start button

 

2. Click control panel

 

3. Choose user accounts

 

4. Choose the account that you want to edit

 

5. Delete the password of the account. 

 

Now I admit I should probably have been more clear but I would have thought
that some assumptions would have been made here and NEVER would have thought
that "password" would have been designated as the main problem (?)

 

Chuck