[Rickertsen2]

I will admit that some of my points were inappropriate. I apologize for the confusion over my post. I would have interpreted it the same way especially considering the hostile overtone it seems to present now that I read over it. I do not support violating school policies. I think that this miscommunication stemmed from the fact that i did not think my response through and assumed that Nukem's situation is that same as that of the programming class at our school. In the case of our programming class, we had many times requested that restrictions be removed and many times received empty promises that they would. The Novell and deepfreeze password aren’t well guarded secrets at my school. They are openly known by a number of students and non IT faculty (and the IT department knows this yet takes no actions to change them. We have warned them of the danger of this). This year we approached the school administration and asked them if it would be ok we made the changes ourselves since IT failed to take action. They agreed and granted us WRITTEN PERMISSION. The IT department in our county deos not have it’s act together and is often referred to as the Idiot Technology department.

Once I started rambling off about re-flashing the BIOS I was starting to go off into a hypothetical tangent. I once bought a laptop off eBay which the seller failed to communicate had a bios password. I removed it by re-flashing the bios with an EEPROM programmer. I assumed that the people of these forums would have enough sense not to take this suggestion too seriously.

As for my last suggestion of swapping out the hard drives with one of your own, I understand that this might be against the wishes of the IT department, but it is fairly benign. By doing so, you do not circumvent any security measures and do not alter the laptop in any was as long as you put the original hard rive back before you return the laptop. Also I do not see any harm in wiping the computer as long as you make an image of it before you do so and restore the image before you give the computer back. Again I feel such extreme measures should only be used as a last result.

I am sorry for the commotion I have caused