Password in Windows 10: how to make you change so often

The truth is that this is a feature designed specifically for the business environment, but there is no doubt that any measure is not enough to protect access to our PC and keep all the information stored on it safe. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt that any user can configure this option on the system and that he has to change his password very often.

To make this configuration, the first thing we need to know is edition Windows 10 what we have installed on our computer. Depending on the version we have, we will have to use one or another method to force a password change. For Windows 10 Home we will need to run a series of commands from the command line if we want to adjust the time or access our Microsoft account, while in the Pro or Enterprise version this change can be made from the Group Policy Editor.

Forced password change in Windows 10

Whereas most users have a home version Windows 10 on our personal computers, we are going to show the steps that need to be followed in this version in order to be able to force a password change in Windows 10.

For users with Windows 10 Home

From CMD

First of all, open a command prompt window with administrator permissions Therefore, we can write cmd in the search box on the taskbar, and when the command line appears among the results, we select the Open as administrator option, or we right-click on the result itself and select the Run option. as administrator When we are at the command line, follow these steps:

• We run the command wmic UserAccount set PasswordExpires = True if we want the change to be for all users in the system.

• We execute the command wmic UserAccount, where Name = “User” set PasswordExpires = True if we want it to be for a specific user only. In this case, we have to replace the user with the exact username on the system.
• We run the command Net account / maxpwage: XX set how often we want to force a password change in Windows 10. Where XX should indicate the number of days it will take for each password to expire.

From now on, the account or user accounts to which we applied this change will be asked to change the password to access the system every X days that are set by the executed command.

If at any time we want to disable this option and prevent the password from expiring from time to time Windows 10, we need to reopen the command prompt window with administrator rights and run the command:

• wmic UserAccount, where Name = “User” set PasswordExpires = False. If the change is applied to a specific user.
• wmic UserAccount installed PasswordExpires = False. If we did it for all users.

From your Microsoft account

By logging into our account on the Microsoft page, you can also set an expiration date for your password to access our system from time to time. In this case, we will not be able to establish how often we want the password to change in Windows 10 because default term 72 days will be established and it is not configurable.

To do this, we go to the Microsoft page, log into our account and then click on our profile icon to select the option My Microsoft account. Next, we display More action And choose Change Password.

This will show us a change password page from which we can check the “Make me change my password every 72 years” option. If we activate this field after we have changed our Microsoft password, we will see how every 72 days we have to change the password in Windows 10.

For users Windows 10 Pro

Users of this edition of the system have another option to force a password change in Windows 10. They will have to use the Group Policy Editor to do this, so the first thing we need to do is run Run. window. , Win + R, type netplwiz and press OK or Enter.

This will open user accounts a window where we have to select the user for which we want to force a password change, and then click on Extra options Tab. There we have to click on again Extra options button in the advanced user administration option.

The menu of group policies for users and local groups will open. There we have to select the users folder, which will show us all the users we have on the system. We search and select for which we want to force a password change in Windows 10, and click on it with the right mouse button. Then a properties window will open where we will find the option User must change password at next login …

We check this box, apply the changes and from the moment the user tries to log in, after entering the current password, he will be prompted to change his password and confirm it in order to log in to the computer. ,

We choose Extra options At the top of the window is a tab and there we will go to advanced user administration. Click on the one you want to force a password reset with the right mouse button to open the properties window and, as we will see, there will be a section titled User must change password at next login …