Windows 7 Home Premium: turn off password expiration
I use Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS in the various virtual machines I run. This is a space saving thing more than anything: I've limited the boot drive space to 20GB on my base VM so that I can have as many cloned VMs as I want on my external drive, and I'm assuming that Ultimate takes up a lot more room. Anyway...
The base install of Win7 Home Premium sets passwords to expire after 42 days. For a VM this is somewhat overkill (after all, I have to log in to my real machine in order to run the VM), so, today when I tried to log in and the OS came up with "your password has expired, change it" I decided to fix it instead.
Unfortunately the standard way of fixing this (running lusrmgr.msc -- just enter that in the Start search box) doesn't work in the Home Premium version because the snap-in it runs isn't present. Bah. Instead you have open up a Command Prompt as administrator (type "Command Prompt" in the Start search box and instead of just pressing Enter as normal, you right-click the menu item for it and select "Run as administrator") and type the following command at the prompt:
net accounts /maxpwage:unlimited
and press Enter. That should do it. (If you get access error 5, you didn't run Command Prompt as administrator.)
Posted via email from Julian's posterous
Apart from that, an ex-pat Brit, atheist, microbrew enthusiast, Pet Shop Boys fanboy, slide rule and HP calculator collector, amateur photographer, Altoids muncher.
5 Responses
Bob E said...
Thank you! Thank you!
I used to love Windows, but now I feel like an idiot. They’ve hidden everything, it’s absolutely ridiculous. I never had a virus I couldn’t fix, but I’ve found tons of new Microsoft “improvements” that logic does just not follow. I can’t wait for Google to make an open source operating systems!!!
julian m bucknall said...
Bob: Glad I could help! The "net" command is a handy command line program -- it has other uses for different parameters, type "net /help" to find others.
Cheers, Julian
Gustavo said...
Tank Julian, this tip works like a charm
Geert-Jan said...
Good tip!! thanks! Why this is hidden / disabled in Win7 is beyond me, I understand that the average home user needs some protection from messing with 'advanced' settings but this should at least be available 'somewhere' :(
Kevin said...
Great tip thanks. It's been driving my wife mad having to change her password all the time, this has solved it.
Why doesn't the Bill Gates mob tell us things like this?
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