Help with password

[Whittakersara6]

I purchased  a laptop, and it has the previous owners sign in information on it, how can I go about doing a hard reset

[WAWood]

@Whittakersara6 

You probably can't -- as the built-in reset will prompt for the password -- which you do not have.

In addition, HP and the other recovery media sites no longer carry media for Win7 -- so there is nothing you can get from them -- and you need this media to do an external factory reset.

You could try reinstalling from scratch by making media following the instructions below, but there is no guarantee that this will work ...

You can try using Windows images downloaded using the tool from this site -- but there is no guarantee that this download, or the resulting ISO file, is going to work:

https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technology-science/microsoft/67-microsoft-windows-iso-download-tool

Click the Download: Windows-ISo-Download.exe link. This will download that file to your PC. Double-click that file to run it.

Download the tool, run it, and do the following:
1) Select Windows 7 at the upper right
2) Under Select edition, select SP1 OEM -- this is the same as the HP OEM edition
3) Click the Confirm button
4) Select the product language, click confirm button
6) Select either the 64-bit or 32-bit download
7) Select a folder to save the file -- it's downloading 4GB or so of data, so that will take a while depending on the download speed. The progress bar might not show any progress but when the download is nearly done, a window will pop open indicating the ISO file is being moved from a temporary download directory to the folder you selected. The screen will then say Download Complete.

Once you have this, you have a choice of media to create:
1) If you can boot from CD, download and install ImgBurn and use the Write Image to Disk option to create a bootable DVD.
2) If you can boot from USB, download and install RUFUS and use the option to create a bootable USB stick from the ISO file.