sometimes pulling the cmos battery out for a bit works, some times not, depending on the laptop some have jumpers that will reset the bios, and some not.. on an ibm thinkpad i had to pull the motherboard out solder 2 wires to a certain chip like the eeprom make a connector to connect via serial port on the back of my desktop power up the laptop use a memory dumping program to dump the information from the eeprom download a program that could read the information and scrol through till i could make out the password