Yeah, the OEM always wants to ding you
I discovered that the hard way back when I was teaching. One of my students was playing the goofball; he set a random BIOS password AND enabled enhanced security, then came to me when he and his lab partner couldn't get the PC past the password prompt.
"Well, enter the password."
"I don't know what it is."
"You don't know what it is?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Well, I just hit random keys."
"Why didn't you write them down?"
"I thought I would remember them."
"Well then, reset the CMOS."
"I tried that. It didn't work."
"It didn't work? Why not?"
"I don't know."
At that point, his lab partner spoke up and said that, when asked if they wanted improved security, they selected "Yes." After I did the research to find out exactly what they had done, I called IBM and asked what it would take to fix the problem and thanked them very politely for their time when they told meI could replace the chip for x dollars or replace the board for x+50 dollars. A new PC would only cost x+75 dollars.
I had a PROM burner in the classroom and tried wiping the chip, then reloading the BIOS, but IBM had that password tucked away somewhere I couldn't get to it with any address the 64kB chip recognized as valid. I tried everything, even building a script that would put 00 into every addressable byte from 0 to fffff! No luck. Every time I plugged that chip back into the mainboard and booted, it came up to that stupid password screen and wouldn't take anything I put into it.
He was fined the current cost of the PC; the only reason he wasn't charged full replacement cost was that my classroom was scheduled to get new Dell PCs over the summer.
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