by-passing a password

I purchased an ibook through Ebay. Everything works fine. The original owner I cannot find regardless of what searches I use. I would like to be able to update programs, but I need his password in order to allow the updates to download and to erase him as the user. I have the original disks for the iBook, and I was wondering if I reinstalled them, would that wipe him out without giving me a new set of problems. The updates do not seem necessary to me, but I figure I might as well download them when offered. Does anyone know a way around this problem or what the results of re-installing the original disks would be? thank you. Cheers. Tom

If you use the discs to do a clean install, you will be able to set yourself as the new user, but, if you don't have discs for any non standard programs on there, then you will lose them altogether.
The way around it is to create yourself as new user , transfer everything over, and delete the old user afterwards.

This article should help you.

In Mac OS X, how do I create and delete users? - Knowledge Base