parrothead 
I start the day as usual having some coffee while I check in on the computer for any leads and try to plan my day out.
Today there was a post on facebook from a local computer geek club I belong to. One of the guys was at a local pawn shop and noticed they had a bunch of pretty nice desk tops ranging from $25 to $50. They all had 2 hard drives. Each drive was 250 minimum. There was also killer RAM in them. Gskill 2gb x 2. A couple of units had fancy light up cases.
I went there and checked them out. There were a mess of computers. Some insanely priced, and a bunch in that one group.
The reason for the price was as follows. They were all marked "has windows, needs password".
After going through them, there were 5 of them priced at $25 and had 2 hard drives, 2 to 4 gig of RAM, 400 or higher watt power supply and a few other goodies. I bought those 5 towers.
I plugged the first one in and turned it on. It had 2 500 gig hard drives. One was hooked up, the other not. I removed the one not hooked up and it tested well. When I powered up the unit, a screen came up and gave me 2 options for the computer. Windows XP or Windows server 8. I chose server 8 and was pleasantly surprised that there was a user name under the name of the pawn shop. SCORE! No password and I am in. This unit works great and I have some access into it to check it out.
I fire up the second unit. This one as 2 - 250gb hard drives. It too has 2 options for booting. Office 2007 A +, or Office 2010 Dream Weaver. When I select one, it goes to a windows 7 window for the password. No pawn shop option on this one. I try to get in and of course can not. I am left with the old password not accepted message, but also left with the following.
"password hint PW"
So I try all kinds of variations of password, PassWord, PW, pw, you get the picture and no luck.
Many other things to do, so had to give it up for the night. All of these computers came from the same owner (a guy that had a computer training center), so I will keep working on that password.
Oh, I forgot to mention, all of these units came with an 18.5 in wide screen/flat screen monitor.
If I can't crack the password to open these up, I am thinking of just installing Ubuntu on them and selling on Craig's List. The cases are very nice and everything works in them with high grade components.
They should attract some geeks.
Worst case scenario is I sell off the parts for double my investment. I'll sleep on it.
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