Changing registration information for Windows 98

I recently "inherited" a computer from a friend whose wife
passed away. It's running Windows 98 and it appears it is
registered in the wife's name and her company name. Also,
I dowdloaded a program from the Internet and it registered
itself with her name and her company name. How do I change
that. Thanks for your help.

There's a script to do this at MVP Bill James's VBScript site:
http://www.billsway.com/vbspage/

--
Gary S. Terhune
MS MVP for Win9x

"Tom" wrote in message
...
I recently "inherited" a computer from a friend whose wife
passed away. It's running Windows 98 and it appears it is
registered in the wife's name and her company name. Also,
I dowdloaded a program from the Internet and it registered
itself with her name and her company name. How do I change
that. Thanks for your help.

Alternatively, though this is inherently more risky, you can use REGEDIT. Run
REGEDIT from the Run box, then use EditFind to search for instances of the
former user's name and change as necessary. Actually, this is a necessary
addition to my previous post, since Bill's script only changes the Windows
Registered owner information, and you would probably want to change that
information for other programs that have already been installed, also.

The risk involved is that by using REGEDIT, you might make a mistake and
accidentally do great harm to your system. For this reason,. you should make
sure you already have a current backup of your registry. You should also know
how to restore a Registry backup from a DOS boot prompt. If you don't already
know these things, post back for a primer.

Lastly, may I suggest that, assuming you were also given all of the software
that originally accompanied that machine (and you should have been given all of
it), you really would be better off simply reformatting the system and
reinstalling Windows and applications from scratch.

--
Gary S. Terhune
MS MVP for Win9x

"Tom" wrote in message
...
I recently "inherited" a computer from a friend whose wife
passed away. It's running Windows 98 and it appears it is
registered in the wife's name and her company name. Also,
I dowdloaded a program from the Internet and it registered
itself with her name and her company name. How do I change
that. Thanks for your help.

Tom wrote in message ...
I recently "inherited" a computer from a friend whose wife
passed away. It's running Windows 98 and it appears it is
registered in the wife's name and her company name. Also,
I dowdloaded a program from the Internet and it registered
itself with her name and her company name. How do I change
that. Thanks for your help.

You need to edit the Registry. You will also have Password files
and User profile issues to deal with to clean it up properly.

To change a User manually requires 3 major steps:

1 Run REGEDIT, find each and every occurrence of the OLD User name,
and change it to the NEW user Name. This may or may not find the
Registered Owner entry, or the demographic information within Office, etc.
For example, in Word itself, you need to click on
Tools = Options = User Information.

2 Run FIND, find each and every file which has the OLD User name,
in full or in part, and substitute the NEW User name accordingly.

3 Run FIND, find each and every occurrence of the OLD User name
which appears as text within a file, and change it to the NEW user name.

When I talk about "name, in full or part", I mean that, if the previous owner name
was William Gates, you need to search for William, and you also need to search
for Gates. That still leaves you with a ton of issues, such as old email and news accounts.
This isn't an easy task, and can easily have disastrous consequences.

Use the Users applet within Control Panel to create a new User,
and make sure that everything is set up properly before even thinking
about deleting the old User.

Been there, done that, don't ever want to be there, do that again.