just recently bought a laptop....the previous owner gave me the appropriate password to unlock it (IBM Thinkpad, Pentium II), however, i logged off of windows and cannot log on no matter what password or username combination i use.....if there is no way in....... how can i open the DOS command prompt??...as the laptop has a dead battery and wont let me do anything with safe mode or the like.....i'm ready to just reformat the drive....help?

What version of windows?

95 or 98?

If it's 95 - i seem to remember (not 100% sure) that you could just type in a new username for example ilikecomputersmorethenyourcatlikestosnuggle and it would create the new username and log in with that.

2000 professional

did you try Offline NT Password & Registry Editor?

no...never heard of it....

now i've made it worse...

i tried reformatting (and did) with windows 2000 pro disc.....the full setup will not complete due to bios reporting a faulty component (most likely the battery as it is dead)

how do i open BIOS and once i do, is there some way to disable the diagnostic agent for the battery, so that i may resume setup?

Haha. I have the same computer... and I had the same problem. All i had to do was press enter with no password. I was kind of mad. Probably has nothing to do with your problem anyways.