Customer dropped a Win7 laptop off that they showed conclusively that they own...but they don't remember the password for the only account. Machine has not been in regular use for 4+ years, and reformatting and reinstall of the operating system can't be done until the data is safely duplicated to another drive.
How should I proceed?
If the drive is functioning and there is no FDE (Full Disk Encryption), just plug the drive into another computer and find and copy the files you wish to recover.
Alternatively you could use a bootable USB stick to 'bring the other OS to this computer', as it were.
You must be having one of these: External Enclosure
So, if the laptop does indeed belong to that person, then take out the HDD & plug it into this enclosure and duplicate all the data from the drive.
After copying all the data present on the HDD, put the HDD back into the laptop and then do a clean install of windows (7 or 8.1 or 10 whichever the user will prefer)
@music2myear has a good comment, and should have posted it as an answer.
Plug the drive into another computer, copy the files off.
If you don't want to pull the drive for some reason, then you can boot from a live Linux CD or USB stick and get at the files that way (copy to an external or network drive).
However, the simplest way off all is probably just to reset the Windows password to a known value (even easier than trying to recover it):
