overnight as5560-7402 doesn't recognize admin account password. ideas, pls?

MerryB

Household user has had Acer Aspire 5560-7402 for about one year.  The laptop came with windows 7 home premium 64 bit operating system.  No recovery disks, just a recovery partition.  The ram has been upgraded from 4gb to 8gb for about two months.  Laptop has mostly worked fine for this past year.  Yesterday the pc recognized the password on the sole administrative user account on the pc, which is also the sole user account on the pc.  User turned pc off for overnight, then this morning the pc claims the user account password is invalid.  User did not manually change the password.

 

I understand we screwed up by not creating a second administrator user account, which could be used to edit this account.

 

Can't get into Acer System Recovery options, because they want the password to go with the user account.

 

Any ideas, please?

MerryB

Argh.  I removed the hard drive from the laptop, put it into an external drive enclosure, retrieved the summer's worth of homework to another pc, and reassembled the acer laptop.  It came back up, accepted its password-- that it wouldn't accept this morning-- and is happily running.  I had user officially remove the password on the account for now, we are making another administrative account as a failsafe, and are running all malware software we can find.  Starting with Advanced System Care 6.3 and Mcafee.

 

Something definitely happened to the software, because the default search engine is different from what it was set to before this morning's problem.  Turns out user installed a great deal of software this past weekend.

 

If anyone has any suggestions, they will be gratefully accepted.

 

Now that the all-important homework is retrieved, there is time to locate an Acer service facility and lug the laptop there with all its receipts and warrenties and packaging.  Will they have recovery disks that can be purchased, since such disks were not available through the vendor of the pc at the time of purchase?  Or would it simply be better to purchase a new copy of Windows 8 and install it?  Might they be able to figure out what happened to the pc?

 

Thank you for reading.  This got way long.