Windows 8 Password Problem

A friend recently died and his widow gave me his Asus laptop model R503C-RH31 (without any recovery disks, etc.). The laptop came with Windows 8 and I don't know if it has been updated to 8.1. Unfortunately, I can't login to the computer because I don't know his Windows password and neither does his widow. I am not interested in any of his files, although I might like some of his programs, so my first thought was to see if I could access his password via the command prompt.

I got into advanced setup by using F9 and selected "restart in safe mode with command prompt." The selection did not take me to safe mode but instead took me back to the login screen. Tried this several times without success.

My next approach was to attempt to reset the computer via the advanced setup. This resulted in a message to the effect that the recovery partition could not be accessed or was not available (can't remember exact message).

Read that Asus sells a Notebook Recovery Software disk for $50 but am not sure if it would work. I suppose $50 would be a small price to pay for a laptop.

I am at a dead end and would appreciate any advice on another course of action.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/site-suggestions-help-announcements/109941-forum-rules.html

 

Agreed. Bypassing security measures is against forum rules.
Thread closed.