Setting Windows User Account with Random Password

There are many freewares capable of generating random password for you if you couldn’t think and decide what password to use for your internet banking, emails, user account and etc… It is not that hard to code a program that does something like that, that’s why most of random password generators are offered for free. A good unbreakable password must consist of numbers, uppercase & lowercase letters, and symbols with at least 8 characters so that brute force attacks would take at least many years to be successful and by that time you might have already changed to a new password.

If you’re using a shared computer, it is very important to make sure that your user account password strength is strong enough to prevent against cracking using Ophcrack or Login Recovery. If someone cracked your user account password and logged into the computer with it, you may not even notice it unlike if your password is being reset/changed with Offline Windows Password & Registry Editor. They now have access to your files and possibly even passwords that are saved in your web browser.

If you go User Accounts shortcut in Control Panel or the Computer Management tool, you can only find the option to change or set a new password but nothing about helping you in generating a secure random password. However, there is a command line tool found in system32 folder in Windows called net.exe which can be used to modify user accounts, share folders, start services, synchronize time, changing user passwords with a random one and many more functions which can be referred by typing net.exe HELP command.

To automatically generate a random password for a user account using the net.exe tool:

1. Click the Start button and type cmd followed by holding Ctrl+Shift and press Enter.

2. Click the Yes button on the User Account Control window and a command prompt window will appear.

3. Type the following command to generate a random password for the user account Raymond. Simply replace the word Raymond in the command line below with the username that you want to set a random password.

net user <raymond> /random

The new random password is generated on screen with the status message saying “The command completed successfully“. There is no need to supply the current password for the user account. If you get the error message “System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied“, it means that your account doesn’t belong to administrator group or you did not launch the command prompt as administrator. Pay special attention to step 1 where we suggest you to hold Ctrl+Shift keys and followed by pressing Enter on your keyboard.

This method only works for local account and not on domain. One important note, be very careful with random password because normally it takes a lot of effort and time to memorize it. You can write it on a piece of paper and keep it in your wallet or purse. This method works on Windows XP, Vista and 7 both 32-bit and 64-bit.

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