Change all references held by previous owner/administrator to new owner

gerevent · Jul 27, 2008

I purchased my HP from a big computer store with Vista home installed on it. It was an out of the box sale (I thought I could avoid a wait for the comptuer I wanted). The company that sold it to me was listed as the administrator. The old owner took off their password before I took possession of the computer I purchased. I followed instructions on how to put on a password to start the computer. However, there are dozens of fiels named after the previous administrator. I tried to find out how to change the administrator globally to my name. There is still an administrator account name and it appears the previous administrator is still above my permission status - even though i am the computer owner, don't think I am the ultimate administrator yet.

I read that not being able to use screen print was a result of not being the administrator. I can't make the screen print work either.

I assume some members have dealt with these matters before. I would greatly appreciate anyone directing me to some good "how to fix" information.

Thank you

and boy do I miss XP!!!!!!!!

Dwarf · Jul 27, 2008

Hi gerevent and welcome to the forums :party:

See if you can solve your problems with the aid of the following Tutorial (and the links within).
Dwarf

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67567-administrator-account.html

rive0108 · Aug 17, 2008

Umm, why not just reformat, and reinstall the O/S and driver/app disk? probably wont take more than 45 min. or so :confused:

There is no telling what the store (or a customer playing with it) installed/deleted etc.

The fix is as easy as placing the dvd in drive, restarting computer>hitting any key at prompt to boot from disk>following prompts/deleting existing partition/reinstall Vista
or booting from recovery partition and doing a full destructive reformat/reinstall if no media disk is available.

Brink · Aug 17, 2008

Hi Gerevent, and welcome to Vista Forums.

The built-in Administrator account link posted by Dwarf will give you full control of the computer. You should not change the user name for this account though.

If you wanted to change the other C:\Users\(User Name) folder's name, then the only way to do this is to create a new administrator account and delete the old one from within the new account.

If you have a multimedia keyboard, then you may need to press the F Lock key to use the PrtScn (Print Screen) key.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

johngalt · Aug 17, 2008

Umm, no, he means the default user account with the admin access.

Also, there is *always* an administrator account above you - You are obviously new to Vista, and you'll need to realize that running with full administrative privileges across the board is a *bad* thing - don't believe me? Go read some statistics on how many virus proliferated with the advent of XP and it's *unrestricted* access to system resources.

Finally, You *really* should restore your computer to factory settings - that machine should either have come with a disc to reinstall from scratch or else should have a recovery program to reset everything to default. Trust me, you'll want to do this because you have *no* idea what all has been put on that machine.

Change all references held by previous owner/administrator to new owner

gerevent

New Member

My Computer

System One

Dwarf

The Contemplator

My Computer

System One

rive0108

My Computer

System One

Brink

My Computers

System One System Two

johngalt

Antidisestablishmentarianist

My Computers

System One System Two