This exists because it happened to me first
Every service page tells you it understands your problem. This one had it. Here is the account, and the two things that came out of it, one you pay for and one you do not.
The lockout
In 2023 I bought an Acer Predator Helios 16, a PH16-71, from Amazon in the US. In 2026 I wanted Linux on it, which needs one ordinary change: turning off Secure Boot. I pressed F2 and the machine asked me for a password.
I tried everything I have ever used. None of it worked, because none of it was it. After three wrong attempts the firmware stopped asking and did something else instead: it wrote a file called code.txt.
That file is Acer's official answer: you send it to them, they turn it into an unlock code with a key only they hold. I got far enough into it to say with confidence that it is a genuine dead end, not "hard" but closed. The free generators had nothing to say to it either: they answer a much older prompt. People are still sold tools that claim otherwise, so I wrote up what a code.txt turned out to be.
Three refusals
So I asked Acer, three times.
Their support forum. I owned the machine and had the file their own firmware had written for this exact purpose. They refused, and closed the thread.
The authorised service centre in Jordan, where I live. Not a Middle Eastern product, so not their machine to help with.
Acer in the US. Ship the laptop to them. From Jordan. For a forgotten password, with proof of purchase in hand.
Nobody broke their own rules. The effect is still that a mechanism built so owners could recover their machines had no path for one who could prove it was his.
Doing it anyway
Every repair forum agreed you cannot do this in software on a newer Acer. That advice is not stupid, just older than the machines it is applied to. So I went at the firmware itself, with a lot of help from AI tooling for the reverse engineering.
Your BIOS cannot store your password, but it has to store something, because it has to recognise the password when you type it. That something is on your machine right now, whatever you have forgotten. It was never sent anywhere, and Acer does not have it.
I found how the firmware keeps it, how it checks what you type against it, and how to read it back out without writing anything to the machine. Then I worked backwards from it, on my own hardware, recovered the password in plain text, typed it at the F2 prompt, and it worked.
The password was one I had never chosen
A short run of digits, nothing I recognise, and to this day I do not know where it came from. Which is why I do not disbelieve people who say they cannot remember. I could not either, and trying harder was never going to produce it.
The paid service, and what it cannot do
I built a service around it, because as far as I can find nobody was offering this remotely: not the generators, not the chip-swap shops, which need the laptop opened, and not Acer, which needs it shipped.
It is the same reading step I did on my own machine. You download a small read-only Windows program, run it on the locked laptop, and send back the one sealed file it writes. The recovery happens offline on my equipment. Nothing is opened, nothing is posted, nothing is written to your firmware. It costs $70 to $200 by processor generation and whether you attach a proof of purchase, confirmed before anything starts, and you pay only after it works, the only honest way to price something that can fail.
The limits matter more. This is a best-effort recovery service, not a guarantee, and turnaround times are targets, not deadlines. It needs an Intel Acer laptop running Windows, with an administrator account you can sign in to. AMD machines, Acer Chromebooks and Acer desktops run different firmware and are turned away outright, at any price, for that separate reason. It recovers a setup-screen password on a computer you are already inside: not a way past a Windows login, and nothing to do with disk encryption. Not every model has been proven on a machine in front of me, and the models page grades every row verified rather than inferred, saying plainly which results are only inferred from the processor generation. Starting a recovery costs nothing and tells you where you stand.
The free unlockers, and why they are free
Older laptops behave differently: instead of writing a file, they print a code on the screen. That answer was reverse engineered years ago and published, so there is nothing to sell. The unlockers here cover seven manufacturers, run in your own browser so nothing you type reaches me, and take seconds. No email address, no account and no payment. There are a few ads on that page and an optional donation link, which is what pays for the hosting, and nothing on it is withheld from anyone who ignores both.
The work is not mine either: it comes from dogbert's research and the open implementations, credited on that page. I added them because people arriving with the older lock were landing on a page selling them something they did not need, and deserved to be told it costs nothing. If that is your machine, use the tool and go.
One person, and whether that is worth trusting
My name is Fawaz and I am in Amman, Jordan. One person. This is not a company with a support department, and pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on the site. No office to walk into, nobody to escalate to, and a slow reply means there is one of me, not a queue.
In exchange, the person who did the work reads your email, and the terms put the risk on me: nothing is charged before a password is in your hands, no deposit and no assessment fee. Before any money moves I describe your password back to you, its length and the kind of characters in it, without sending any part of it. Ask whatever would settle it: support@getoutsyde.click, @Alghzawi01 on Telegram, or u/Fawaz9005 on Reddit.
Two things I will not do: touch a machine you do not own, which is why every application confirms ownership and anything that reads as a locked-out thief rather than a locked-out owner is declined, and publish the method, which is what makes this a paid service instead of a script. The fair criticism of the second is that you then judge the work on its reasoning and its terms rather than on source code.