Locked out of computer

jwilde said:

Hi all.

My parents locked themselves out of their laptop HP. It is running Windows 10 Home edition. I am trying to reset the password for them, but it's not working.

When I try to log in, it says "make sure you are using the password for your Microsoft account".

So I go through the process to reset the Microsoft account password. It is successful, I am even able to login to account.live.com site with the new changed password.

However, when I start the laptop and try to type that same password into the login screen, it doesn't accept it.

As a last resort, I followed a youtube tutorial about changing utilman.exe to a command prompt, but when I get to the User Accounts pop up window, the "Reset Password" button is grayed out and it says "You cannot change the password for user@outlook.com" (I changed the email address for privacy reasons)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

You'll either need another OS installed ie dual boot, or you will need another computer for this. Get a USB stick and download Hirens Boot CD. It's about 1-2GB and can be booted into in order to reset the administrator password. It's a massive collection of tools that are used to do many tasks revolving around managing an operating system, particularly one you might not be able to boot into and/or log in to. It's been around for well over a decade and is a trusted companion for computer repairs and/or diagnostics. You can find more info here on Hirens Boot CD: Hiren's BootCD PE

Both of these options are 'soft options' ie they don't require extreme decisions to be made, like resetting the computer and/or wiping it manually to start over again. Lots of people revert to this but there is often no need as Windows has no way to prevent password resets when using a medium like a USB stick to modify the system when it's offline ie not running. This is how digital forensics experts access hard drives when the OS has no way of defending itself. The nature in which operating systems work is they are simply a huge bunch of files on a hard drive that can be opened and messed around with when you choose to look at the hard drive in ways other than simply running it by turning the computer on and booting into the operating system provided. The only exception is drive encryption when this data cannot be accessed until the drive has been decrypted. If I'm right in saying Windows Home does not come with full BitLocker drive encryption functionality and so if there hasn't been any third-party encryption software installed to do this job your Windows partition will very likely be accessible by means outlined above. It's also non-invasive as it only modifies a very very small part of the system.

Try this and reply with your results.
If you have trouble booting to the USB stick go through to your UEFI settings and override the boot sequence to run the USB stick. Reset the password for the account which is administrator and then turn off the computer, unplug the USB stick, restart and simply login. You shouldn't need a password to login.