Want to automatically log into your Windows 7 computer without entering a password? In earlier versions of Windows, you had to remove the password associated with your account to log in without any prompts.
In Windows 7, you can set up your accounts so that you can log in automatically even if your account has a password. This is really useful for people who have computers in a safe place or who simply do not need additional security measures.
In this article, I will explain how to set this up for a home computer and a computer that is joined to a domain. If you’re using a domain, you’ll have to hack the registry a bit to get it to work.
Set up automatic logon for a Windows 7 Workgroup computer
It’s pretty simple. Click Start, then type the following in the command field and press Enter:
netplwiz
The Advanced User Account Properties dialog box opens. You can also get to this screen by typing Run in the command field and then typing
control userpasswords2
in the run dialog. You will get the same dialog anyway.
Go ahead and uncheck the box that says “Users must enter a username and password to use this computer.”
When you uncheck the box and click OK, you will be prompted for the current password for the current user account.
This is it! Now restart your computer and you’re done. You no longer need to enter a password or click one of these user icons. You will just be automatically logged into Windows 7.
Set up automatic login for a Windows 7 domain computer
If you are joined to a domain, you will follow the same steps, but you will quickly realize that there is no checkbox in the box at all! So how do you get it back? Using a registry setting.
Open Registry Editor (Start, then type regedit) and navigate to the following section:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Winlogon AutoAdminLogon
As you can see, the value should be set to 1. If it is 0, the checkbox will not appear. Go ahead, change the value to 1 and restart your computer. Now open the dialog and you should see a checkbox.
However, this may not be noted. So you need to check this box, click OK, then go back to the dialog and uncheck the box again. At this point, it will ask you to enter your credentials and you should be fine.
Bonus tip : If the Windows 7 domain auto-logon method above did not work, you can try to get auto-logon to work by configuring three more values ??in the same registry location mentioned above.
If they don’t already exist, you can add these three keys shown below in Winlogon:
DefaultDomainName (String) DefaultUserName (String) DefaultPassword (String)
Set the keys to the appropriate values ??and restart your computer. It used to be a method to automatically join a Windows XP computer to the domain for logon, but you can still use it for Windows 7! Enjoy!
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