As some of you know I have (now had) an Uncle who, when he exited my family (50 years ago) was wealthy. He came back 10 years ago homeless. He lived with us for 3 years and then moved on trying to recoup his fortune. Two weeks ago he died, NOT alone and NOT on the streets.
He had 2 computers that we gave him. One was a dell and the other an hp. He also left a flash drive. My uncle was working of family stuff. Does anyone know how to get into the computers? There is no money or treasure maps. In case he left some family notes I would dearly love to read it.
Did he have a will? If so, he might have indicated in it who was to receive his digital property and that person might have the log-in information. If you’re not the beneficiary or the next of kin (if he had no will), you should probably try to find that individual first, because the computers and their contents presumably belong to that person. If you are the beneficiary or next of kin, look around his home for passwords. Many people do write them down.
You can probably pull the internal drives, put them in an external enclosure, then plug them in as external usb drives. If they’re not encrypted the contents might be readable.
External enclosures are pretty cheap; search on something like “external hdd enclosure” or something similar, or drop by your local Best Buy for help.
I am the next of kin. He didn’t leave anything except clothes (which I purchased and then donated after his death, hearing aids (donated) an empty wallet (donated)…and the computers (we bought)…He didn’t have an apartment. He was living a convalesent home.
No will. No apartment. A few papers, none, so far that had family information.
If the machines won’t boot you can take the hard drives out of the machines and you can get for about 25 bucks an ide or ata (both are common hard drive types) to usb adapter (usually has a power supply with it to power the drive), which would allow you to connect it to a laptop or other computer and read it as an external drive. Newegg sells the adapter. The only problem will be if the system was password protected, you may not be able to read the drive.