[MrGadget]

Hi, I've been given an acer laptop running vista to try and just "nuke" back to factory defaults.
-Acer laptops come with "acer empowering technology" - basically a restore system to make recovery disks.

When I tried to run this, it says on popup error.. "GUEST USER CANNOT RUN EMPOWERING TECHNOLOGY FRAMEWORK"

-I thought fair enough, you wouldn't wanna let guests reformat your laptop from clicking an icon..
so went in to control panel, users, and to my horror found only this user, listed as administrator? :|
-I clicked create new account, and instead of saying you dont have rights to, whatever i type in as a new account name, -it says invalid and a whole list of brackets etc that I can use.. I typed "william" and allsorts of very simple usernames.

My guess is this:
The guest account has been renamed, and all other users have been deleted.

SAFE MODE command prompt shows no admin login, cant find it as hidden, and net user commands ALL result in error 5 access denied to do anything, [bleep], if i even list this user, it says it doesnt exist :|

confuuuuused.

All I want is admin rights to run the nuke program to get this back to factory defaults and reinstall so her kids can use it.

Any ideas? I've done a good 2 hour google and countless pages that say "hey just log in as administrator!"
-What if you have NO accounts bar a renamed guest?
-Have no vista cd as its all on the drive, and cant run the executable restore COS YOU'RE A GUEST? even though listed as admin in user account control panel?
-I know i could of course use any old vista disk (IF we had one lol thanks acer!) and nuke blank, but then an endless search for drivers etc for this... would love to just format back to factory default.

Have tried:
Normal user account create - fails, any name fails with a daft message saying incorrect characters.
Renaming back to guest - fails.... - no error message on renaming to anything.. just ignored! :|
net user command prompt.. anything i try gets error 5.

I can do registry, safe, command, anythin ya fancy... I'm up for trying anything to just be an admin enough to run the [bleep] recovery disk creation.

there is NO data on the laptop needed. (bar the [bleep] restore image i can't create or run! lol)

Suggestions asap please!

(bows to the geeks)
Mr Gadget

lol at the beeps... not swear words :| d.a.m.n?

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[MrGadget]

oh no! not one reply