Evening,

Wife has an old Acer Windows 7 laptop, purchased in 2011. She hasn't used it for a long time and has no idea what the Windows login password is, despite trying many combinations.

She doesn't have the recovery or installation CD - both are long, long gone. She wants to get into the machine to retrieve photos and download her e-mail.

Can anyone suggest a good (preferably free) tool to bypass this password, or reset it or something? When she tries the reset password option it tells her to insert her Windows CD...of which she doesn't have one :(

I tried creating a bootable USB drive and tried to force the machine to read from it first via the BIOS, but it didn't work and just shunted her straight to the login screen.

Any assistance much appreciated, thanks :)