Advanced user options - Windows XP Home

Hi,

I am currently setting up a PC with about six users - all with random paswords that they need to change for security reasons when they first logon to the PC. In XP Professional, I know there is an option somewhere where you tick a box saying 'User must change password at next logon' and there are loads of other features - 'Account is disabled' or 'User cannot change password' etc.

I am trying to find these features on the PC I am setting up - It is running XP Home, but I cannot find them anywhere!

Does anyone know if these are available in XP Home? I know that XP Home has various features taken away, but I wouldn't have thought that these features for managing users would be one of these features that have been abolished.

Many thanks

XP "Home" is for "Home Users".

Home Users don't usually have passwords in the first place.

The setting you're referring to is inside Group Policy and Local User Management, both are MMC Console files.

You'll need Windows 2000 or XP Professional to apply these policies.

You could look around the Users control panel applet. You can assign passwords, add and remove user accounts, but I don't know if all the properties of XP Pro users are available in XP Home. XP Home can't join a domain (in case you're in a business environment).

That is correct. The properties of XP Pro are not all included in Home. As 1337_d00d said:

Consider that the XP Pro user control panel (when in Netlogon mode) looks totally different than the "easy to use" XP Home/LocalLogon panel)

Note how me, "David", has a globe behind the symbol, this denotes I'm a "NetLogon" user, since my computers are on a domain "WILLOW", I can logon on any computer in my house I like

Gotta love not using a "consumer grade" OS

matthuxtable,

I ran by this discussion forum looking for the same solution. I work at a high school running novell client over windows xp home edition. The problem is, when students change they're novell passwords, it runs the risk of changing my default user account password on the local xp home machine. After looking for a couple of hours and getting lucky, I decided to share my findings:

ok, suppose we have to login accounts, one named "Admin" with "computer administrator" access rights and another named "jdoe" with "limited account" access rights. now, i want to make jdoe so he can't change his password. First thing, login as admin. then open a DOS window ( start menu > run > type "cmd" or c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe ) once you have a DOS window, type


net user jdoe

(or net user %username%)

This will display user attributes that pretty much mirror the options of windows xp professional like “account disabled” and most important, “user may change password”. By default, “user may change password” is set to “yes”. So how do we change this? By typing in this command:

net user jdoe /passwordchg:no

(or net user %username% /passwordchg:no)

After you type this and press enter, you should see “The command completed successfully.” Now, log off admin and login as jdoe. Now repeat these steps under jdoe login but this time change “no” to “yes”:

net user jdoe /passwordchg:yes

(or net user %username% /passwordchg:yes)

If everything is setup correctly, you will see a message like

system error 5…

Access is denied.

And there you go! For a more complete list of other options you can change, go to this link http://neworder.box.sk/files/nullak_ntsecurity/index.php and search for “user may change password:” the rest of the DOS commands are in that area. also, microsoft has syntax for net user here http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_user.mspx

however, i didn't find anything to help with "user must change password next logon" sorry...

Thanks for those tips. They're a great help. I'm putting them to work right away!