Admin Accounts

Have a friend who has Win 8 and then upgraded to 8.1. All was well till last week when he can't do anything in his profile. He is the Admin. His wife is a regular account and the Guest is off. He can get into his profile but IE won't open, WLM won't download but 2 e-mails than crashes.
He got something on it wanting him to pay $$$ to fix it and then it shut off. Have no idea what it is. He did get a phone call from someone claiming to be from MS and wanted a CC # to fix it. He hung up on them.
Went over there tonight and ran MBAM from her account and it won't update because she isn't an Admin. Didn't try to change her to an Admin. Ran it and it found 9 problems. Deleted them all and then rebooted. Ran it again and it shows the same 9 problems like they haven't really been deleted.

Can we go in using her account and make her the Admin and him a user (or leave him as an Admin) and maybe get MBAM to update? I am assuming that he will have to be logged into his account to do the changes. Problem is it won't let him get to the user accounts.

He has nothing important to save. She was backing up some photos she had on there to a thumb drive incase of a complete reinstall. They have all their Bookmarks/Favorites and address book save to the thumb drive from when they went from XP on the old PC to Win 8 on the new one and haven't added anything else.

May have to wipe it and start over. They do have the recovery CD's in case of this type of problem. It is a Dell. Not sure of the model number.

 

No I didn't try a System Restore. I would assume I have to do this from his account and nothing works in his account.

In her account which isn't an Admin account, I can get to his account but didn't want to try to change it to a regular account and then make her an Admin. Figured this would have to be done from his account as he is the Admin.

Will call him tomorrow and see if he can do a SR from his account.

 

Well he can't do a restore as it won't let him get to it.

Dell replaced the HD on this machine about 2 months after he got it. He says he has no DVD's from Dell and was not instructed to make any when he turned on the PC with either HD. I told him to call Dell and tell him that he needed a copy of Win 8 and the driver and programs DVD that come installed on the PC from the factory.

 

Got the computer formatted and put both of them as Admin this time. Will see what happens.