Password on/off in XP

Factual Questions
1

I can’t believe how complicated Win XP is compared to other versions, but this is not a rant (yet).

New notebook came with XP. Set up user account with password, which works OK. However, for a while, will be using it mostly at home, so wish there was an easy way to turn the password protection for logon On and Off.

Any PDA or similar device easily lets you do this on one or two steps. Good old XP, however, requires going through Start, Control Panel, Users, etc etc. Takes five minutes to change account to stop the password, and same to start it again when want to thake the notebook out.

It’s hard to believe they could devise such a clunky system. Am I missing something here? Is there a simple one- or two-step process to do this? None of the Help files give any clue.

Brother. :rolleyes:

2

You can change passwords using the command line. This page explains how: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;251394&sd=tech

For example, if your username in your computer is KlondikeGeoff, then this command


net user KlondikeGeoff /passwordreq:no

removes the password.

If you want to use the password qwerty type:


net user KlondikeGeoff qwerty

To bring up the command line go to Start->Run… and type ‘cmd’

You can automate this process by creating two batch files, one for setting the password and one for removing it. Have fun!

3

Terrific, dog80, megathanks! Never would have thought of this, but using batch files is the answer.

I used to write dozens of .bat files in DOS, and W98 was pretty easy to tweak the way I liked, but now… Ah well. At least I got rid of that stupid dog in the Search menu. :smiley: