Help!

[radical edward]

I recently bought an old mac from a garage sale, the man said it worked and it looked in good condition. I put it together a few hours ago and when the desktop loads something called 'empower' pops up and asks for a password, which I don't know. I can't get it to go away ! I hate to go to all the trouble of buying a disk to reinstall the whole system. Is there another way I can get past 'empower'. I appreciate your help, I've never owned a mac before so please explain things in detail, , thanks again    -Radical Edward

[pendragon]

I am unfamiliar with Empower, so as a guess…

1. Restart while holding down the Shift key. The (re)start up screen will say “Extensions Off”. This is OK.
2. After the machine has fully booted, do a search for Empower. A search, or a Find, is done by holding down the Command (Apple) key and the F key.
3. In the ensuing dialog box, enter “Empower” and click OK, or hit the Enter or Return key or what ever it takes to proceed. The computer will then identify all instances/files where Empower has been found. You may well find a file that is an Application, a Preference, an Extension, and/or a Control Panel.
4. Highlight/drag all these files to the trash.
5. Empty the trash by going to the Special menu at the top of the screen and scrolling down to the place that says Empty Trash. Click there.
6. Restart.

Problem still there?

And of course, a most hearty to TS.

BTW, What kind of Mac do you have?

Harv

[kelly]

radical edward. Hello. Welcome to the Forum.

What Harv said.

Guess it's this. Never heard of it.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/4433

[Gary S]

Hi Radical Edward.

What they said.

It should be pretty easy to find all the stuff, since it's only a 2mb program.

Look in your System folder and check to see if there is anything in the Startup folder and trash it too. That may be why your getting that message at start-up.

[bobw]

Unlock Code

[Paddy]

Bob, the "Unlock Code" only works if you have the "passphrase" - don't think Radical Edward has that either.

Edward, if you can give us as much info about the Mac itself (model, memory, hard drive, installed operating system) as you can, that would help too.

I somehow doubt that simply starting up with extensions off will disable this software...if that was the case, it wouldn't be much use, as anybody would be able to get around it.

In addition, if you remove the Empower extensions without removing the lock on the files/folders/disks then you will not be able to unlock them later. See: http://empowerpro.com/manual/install.shtml#removing

You could of course be lucky, and only have the trial version installed, in which case you can run the trial remover software, found here:

http://www.empowerpro.com/support.shtml (under Administrator Unlock)

http://www.empowerpro.com/

Otherwise, I think you have two options - see if the person who sold it to you has the info you need, or wipe the disk and reinstall the OS and software. So, let us know which model you have etc. and we'll go from there.