I know I don't, or rather never, post here very often, but I have an issue with my Laptop that I've been looking for help with:
 
 A while ago my laptop was crashing randomly and upon reboot it would have lost all the sound drivers, any attempts to re-install etc were futile, my modem would not work either; A week later everything would be all better (quite peculiar, I thought). Then one day it just straight up and left, operating system and all, booting resulted in a black screen. Fans were working and all, I could hear them. I tried connecting an outside monitor to no avail.
 Now its been repaired but a password is required to boot up, I've been told it has been caused by a password on a piece of hardware itself, could this have been caused during repairs? The shop claims to have done nothing involving a password.
 Is there a way to bypass this without knowing said password, or do I need to replace the hardware (I've been told that a piece of hardware is "passworded" I don't consider myself a "techie" so I can't really tell if this is valid or not ... )
 If it is something else please let me know.

 My laptop was an Acer, by the way, if that's relevant at all.

 (Help would be greatly appreciated...)

If your prompted for a password right at the beginning, seconds after you turn it on, then it's most likely a bios password.

Your right in that case. It's a password applied to the motherboard. Good luck resetting this as this is incredibly hard to do and you need to contact your manufacturer.

If it looks like Windows is asking for a password though (you can tell because you'll see all the fancy gui in the backround) then you can just reinstall windows.

Well, it's a bios password then, what exactly do I need to do to get this fixed? Do I need to send it in for repairs to the manufacturer specifically? (I already DID this and it came back with a bios password, wonderful..)

Call them first, there might be a default password. In any case you need to call them as each company has their own method of resetting these type of passwords.

Thanks a bunch Macubex, I'll see if this helps. Since questions have been answered, this can be locked, if needed.