Gateway laptop - resetting passwords

[PSCREPAIR]

Tyring to service a Gatewat P3C laptop made in 1996, used does not know the Power On password.
Gateway tech tells me tht I need to send the laptop in to a Gateway service center. What is the big secret? How does Gateway remove this password? It is not a backup battery issue.

[Gameguru]

I would try to crack the case and either remove the cmos battery or look for a reset jumper somewhere. They may be telling you to return it for service so that you don't have to open the case yourself.

[PSCREPAIR]

Already reset Backup batteries. Dumb Gateway most likely uses either a master password or software utility to remove passwords that they will not release to the public. Never in 10 years of servicing systems have I come across a poor support feature like this for removing Power on passwords.

[shamus]

[quote]Originally posted by PSCREPAIR:
Already reset Backup batteries. Dumb Gateway most likely uses either a master password or software utility to remove passwords that they will not release to the public. Never in 10 years of servicing systems have I come across a poor support feature like this for removing Power on passwords.

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This is not the one I was looking for (can't find the floppy I had it on...DOH! cool little util called PassOff...I'll keep lookig..) but
This site has cmos killer that I've used successfully. Copy it to a floppy, run it from Dos and when you reboot you'll be prompted to go to the cmos setup...Good luck.

[orange]

Shamus, no offence intended but as its the PowerON password he's looking for, he'll have no access to floppy/cdrom or harddrive and therefore won't be able to run a utility?

The only times i've come across this problem and solved it were once on a OEM system where there was a jumper on the mainboard that you had to short out, allowing access to the supervisor section of the BIOS, and secondly, on an OEM laptop where you had to short together a number of pins on the parallel port using a special dongle to disable the password.

Sounds to me like Gateway just want to make some easy cash - i'd be inclined to call some laptop specialists and see if you can weedle the info out of them.

Does the password prompt give you the option of inserting a password disk?