I've just been given an ex-corporate Dell laptop running Vista.

It has one user account that I have the password for, but not the admin password.

Which of course is rather limiting.

I rebooted and tried to go to safe mode to create an admin account, but then I was greeted by a "Bitlocker" screen that again asked me for a password.

I'm not familiar with Bitlocker, but a few minutes with Google tells me that it's full disc encryption and not crackable short of hacking the hardware.

So I definitely want to get rid of that, I care more about losing access to my files than securing them from the KGB.

So, is there an alternative to nuke and reformat and install the OS from scratch?

And are there any issues with doing this with Bitlocker -- I don't want to brick it.

I'd like to keep the installed drivers and apps, but if not, c'est la vie.

If you aren't being prompted at boot for a TPM pin (and are only prompted when changing the boot options), you can simply pave the disk using the installation media and reinstall. Anything on a bitlockered volume must be formatted away, of course, and can only be saved when booted into the OS (or if you have the recovery key offline), but getting rid of it isn't too hard.

If the account you have the password for has admin rights you can decrypt the drive without reinstalling. If you only have a limited account you can't do much with bitlocker and you are pretty much stuck wiping the drive and reloading.

Thanks. I gave up on trying to hijack the Windows install and installed Ubuntu, wiping the disk.

I might add a dual boot to XP later.