my grandson was playing with my old laptop its a dell inspirion 6400 he locked us out my wife and i have new?

A skilled professional p.c. support person has techniques for clearing out the password, if that is what you are talking about. How did he lock you out?

Additional: Note that if you follow the instructions on how to restore, you will wipe out all your data, including pictures, music, e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, etc. Is that okay?

What did he do? Change the password of the administrator account? Well if thats the case, boot up in safe mood with command prompt, in it type: net user, it will show all the users on the computer, once you know the user names and find the the user password you want to change type: net user (account name here) *

An example: Net user John *

it will then prompt for you to enter a new password for the user and to confirm it.

If you want to wipe the laptop entirely I suggest you reformat your hard drive. You will need to boot from your operating system cd, and wipe out the old operating system and files, reinstall the operating system and reinstall all your drivers for your devices.....

Did he change the windows log in password? If no one needs anything on the laptop the easiest way to get back into it is to just reformat the computer. You will need to get your hands on a copy of a windows operating system.

lol yea man well sir your going to either try hard to get the password and use the hint: and access in or call support on the phone and try to maybe do something i doubt it but maybe they could get your threw administrator and change it.But i think worst comes to worst your going to have to buy a new harddrive and change it all out it just cost me about 260 bucks at a repair shop.

so i think you should just buy them a new small laptop cause your going to buy repairs anyway so the cost is not worth it probably cost more than the comp itself but you could knock out 2 birds with one stone anyway by buying a nice 300$ laptop that the kids would like anyway and there cheap heres the link iv been noticing buisness are selling small laptops for cheap just to get them in house holds the price is very much worth it i mean 300$ bucks for a laptop its nice and it will last your old one will give up anyway so you make the choice hope i helped very nice for every day use check the 300$ ones out the sites mysimon.com laptops heres link

http://www.mysimon.com/9566-3121_8-0.html?filter=1...

When you boot the laptop press F11. Some Dell computers may require that you press CTRL and F11. This should bring up the system restore and you can return the laptop to the same configuration as when it left the factory. If all else fails log on to dell and ask the support people for specific answer for your system.

The link below is to restore a dell with windows vista;

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx...

try starting it up in safe mode hopefully the default admin password has not been changed.

it will not show up in normal start up

if it has not then just delete all the user accounts turn off the computer then on again and you should be in.

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If you are giving the old one away, I would re-install the OS on it from scratch.

If you don't get a good answer here, go to this forum and state your problem clearly.

http://forums.techguy.org/

find out wat the pass code is and try u will find it over time