Do I have a password or not?

Yes, it is the user account. This is (yet) connected to iCloud.

This is where I get confused. Your link says:

>If you don't know your current password

>If you forgot your user account password, start up your Mac and try to log in.

But it never asks me to log in. If I reset the Mac it logs itself in automatically, without ever asking me to login. I am right there on the desktop. Which makes me think there is no password. Only when I do the update, it asks me for a password.

>It can be set to automatically login any user, PW or not,

Thank you, that is helpful to know. I guess that must be what is happening here.

>What version of OSX are you on?

It's currently on 10.4.7, I would like to bring it as up to date as possible. Ideally all the way to Yosemite so I can use iCloud Drive Photos to sync the photo collection with a different machine. It is an older Mac that has not been connected to the Internet for a long time. I know Apple stop supporting newer operating systems on old Mac, but I could not find the list which says how far up the upgrade path each model of Mac can go. This is an old iMac, with a 2.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo and 1Gb of RAM. So I suspect I am not going to get Yosemite, but I need to update as far as I can to get all the bug fixes, that's blocked without a password at the moment.

From your description I need to try the password recovery link (which I will do next week). I am not hopeful of that being successful. I assume what I have to do in that case is back up the data and reinstall the OS from scratch.

>does it say admin under your name?

Yes it does.

>Hardware Overview:

I have that bit. The bit I am missing is the chart that says if you have such and such a Mac you can go up to Lion, or Yosmite, or whatever. I am sure I once saw a webpage with such a chart, I just cannot find it again.