Hi,
My father-in-law passed quite suddenly recently, and we're only just getting to grips with things.
My mother-in-law is trying to access his passworded laptop, but she can't remember the (windows10) login password. He managed a lot of their bills and administration on the laptop.
He didn't password files or anything and I believe it's just the win10 login which is the only password for the whole laptop.
Can anyone clarify if the password also locks out the HDD? I thought maybe to remove the HDD and hopefully view the files from another computer.
I didn't want to try (yet) just in case she remembers the password or takes the action the wrong way or indeed is fruitless exercise.
Thanks in advance.
As long as it's not from a vendor that has whole disk encryption setup out of the box (which you'll usually only see on business model lines), and your father-in-law didn't setup whole disk encryption himself, then you should just be able to pull the drive and plug it into another PC.
Access to his user files will still require his password, but administrative rights on the machine your using to access the drive will usually give you access.