Can't login to Windows !

[northridge]

Just got my Asus laptop back from the second repair in 2 months - both times they replaced the motherboard - and it was new in July.

But I can't login to Windows. The password is a single lower-case letter - not something I could easily forget or confuse.
I spoke to the Asus people who handled the repair and they said that there is no indication on the repair sheet that any OS meddling/re-installing was done.

Now even when I boot into Safemode the login screen comes up.
What on earth can I do?

[noell]

I assume you are talking Windows XP so you should be able to fix it with your WinXP CD and using the "Repair" feature. Here's more detail:

http://www.flightsim.com/dc/dcboard....id=26771&page=


....Noell

[northridge]

Thanks Noell.
Couldn't repair - didn't appear as an option. But the full re-install was quite a revelation.
The laptop came with XP Home Media Centre and there are three 'Recovery' Discs and one disc of Drivers. But the interesting stuff happened after all of those had loaded.
At least half an hour of patches, running with command prompts and flashing cursors and doodads in a black window, with one of the most prominent being "Sleep" patches with several numbered versions. This was interesting because the laptop first went AWOL by turning itself off or Hibernating at will.
I don't know where the patches were being installed from: there was no cd activity: perhaps they were coming from the 'Recovery Partition' on the HD that appears not to get formatted.
If the patches were there when I bought the laptop might it suggest that the build was faulty from the get-go? If they were put there during the "repairs" (twice since new in July) it suggests that Asus Tech doesn't know its ass from its dromedary and is waving in the wind.
I tried to get concrete information from them about the fault - answer; "It's pointless to hypothesize about possible causes". When I suggested that I would have to send the laptop back again in two months he said "Why, if the first fault only showed at four months and the second at two months after that? Maybe it'll run properly for four months now."
The silliest thing is that I don't need a laptop - I just wanted one. And oh boy did I get one!