How to log on to Windows XP automatically

While in in many cases it would be a security risk, having your Windows XP computer log in automatically can be useful. For example, I have my Windows XP instance running under a virtual machine on my Mac. The easiest way to do this would be to use the Administrator account and simply leave the password blank. However, this has two distinct disadvantages: you can't log onto a domain with a machine that is not using a password, and you cannot have a machine configured this way accept Remote Desktop connections.

I have no need to use Remote Desktop to access my virtual machine, but since my XP instance needs to access a Windows network, I do need a password set. In the past, the easiest way to configure your machine to automatically log on was to use TweakUI powertoy for XP, where there is a setting under Logon for configuring automatic logons.

But there's an even faster way do do this.

On the machine that you want to configure to auto-login, click Start, Run, then type "control userpasswords2" (without the quotation marks) and press enter. In the window that pops up, click on the user account that you would like to automatically log in, then uncheck the "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer" checkbox. You will now be asked for the password for this account. Set it, click OK and OK, and you're done.

Tags: auto-login, automatically-login, freeware, how-to, howtos, login, powertoys, tweak-ui, windows-xp, xp