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An acquaintance of mine just bought a new laptop today. On Windows 7, he has been used to using the character generated by Ctrl-Backspace(ASCII 127) in his password. In fact, his password was simply 3 times this character, because he figured it would be hard to guess.

So he boots up his new laptop that has Windows 8 on it, and uses the same password when creating a user account. This works fine here. However, when he tries to log on, the Ctrl-Backspace combination does not work. Neither does using alt+numpad to enter the keycode. So now he is simply unable to log on to his brand new computer, and there was no windows 8 disk accompanying it so he would be able to reset/reinstall.

Is there anything he can do? Or does he have to take it back to the retailer?

Thanks in advance.

PS: This is obviously a bug -- where does one file bugs for Windows 8?

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    Its tough not to chuckle, :) .No its definitely not a bug, you friend needs to do a password recovery. There are several ways to do it, infact you might find it here on SU.
    – Shekhar
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 17:27
  • Using a boot disk of TRK should provide an account unlocker.
    – iamwpj
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 17:30
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    Also, in all honesty that's a horrible password, DELDELDEL? or ⌂⌂⌂ is only slightly less guessable then aaa, bbb etc...
    – Austin T French
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 17:47
  • There aren't many computers anymore that even come with the recovery disk; however, the majority have a recovery partition. You may need to google the key combo to enter it, but usually on boot it is one of the F-keys.
    – nerdwaller
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 21:38

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Try holding Alt and then type 127 in via the Numpad on your keyboard. Let go of the Alt key and it should insert ASCII character 127. Repeat twice more to get three of them.

Note: ASCII 127 is the "Delete" code. So often it will do what it's supposed to and delete a character instead of displaying the 'box' (because it's an unprintable ASCII Code with no actual symbol). So you may just be out-of-luck.

Related SU question: Ctrl+Backspace inserts a small box instead of erasing
Related question over on StackOverflow: Which character is Ctrl+Backspace?

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