Forgotten Password

The first 700 MHz eMacs shipped with OS X 10.1.4, which was, to put it politely, somewhat primitive compared to 10.2, let alone later versions. However, as far as I can recall, the passwd command was the same in 10.1 as in later versions. Unix commands are quite sensitive to case or extra spaces; make certain you're typing the command exactly as intended.

There's no leading "/" on the passwd command, nor should there be anything after the username. Using your example,the syntax would be just:
passwd johnsmith

Does this work?:

Boot into single-user mode (command-S during startup)
Once the command-line prompt appears, type the following:
mount -uw /
cd /private/var/db/netinfo
mv local.nidb local.old
rm ../.AppleSetupDone
exit

This makes the setup assistant re-run.

If you need to recover files from your old user account, (if FileVault is off), you can probablly change your permissions. If you want to know, please post (if you're still reading this).

Posted from my iPod Touch (with 2.0 software).

You may want to look at Apple's page, Switch 101 - The Great Migration:

http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/migrate/

Your neighbor may want to consider putting Windows on the Mac, BootCamp:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html

or VMware Fusion

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/system_requirements.html

or Parallels Desktop

http://www.parallels.com/en/landingpage/dskd13/?gclid=CK2Fh9KsmpUCFQO2FQodFBzUHA

Sorry, I am the first time user of eMac. Nobody at my company could remember the admin password of one eMac machine. I tried to follow your instruction to reset the admin's password. When I type "rm ../.AppleSetupDone", it shows "No such file or directory". For more information about my eMac: it has multi-users setup and only user's account can be logged in.