We've got an old laptop at home, my mum got it from works years ago, that company has since gone under and besides, no one would want this thing back.
It's an old Toshiba, running windows XP, and we don't have an administrators password, only access to her normal user account, nor do we have any installation discs that it presumably shipped with. The thing is painfully slow, we can't even install flash player, and it's managed to pick up some form of malware along the way.
Is it possible to somehow install a fresh copy of XP, or does anyone know any way of getting into an administrators account (already tried admin+password) so that I can attempt the clean the damn thing out?
Most retail PCs and Laptops have a recovery partition that you can boot into, allowing you to restore the device to factory condition. If it doesn't have one then download an ISO to a flash drive or something and use that. Before you do, however, check the underside the laptop as there will usually be the product key for the OS stuck there which you can use to reactivate the the XP once installed.
Word to the wise though, support for XP expires in April this year so MS won't be issuing updates any more to keep the computer secure in future. You may seriously want to consider getting hold of a copy of Vista/7/8 or just buy new machine (seeing as it was shipped with XP, it must be fairly ancient).
