The advanced user password control center in Windows is a hidden feature. It allows Administrative users to reset or remove passwords of every user account. It also allows to add or remove a user from the computer. You can access the User Accounts manager by typing

control userpasswords2

in the run dialog (WIN+R – find out ) or Command Prompt.

This can only be done from an account with Administrative privileges and not from a limited account. Type control userpasswords2 in RUN (Start»Run) box, the above dialog will pop up. Select the Account to reset password and Click Reset Password, You need not know the Users current password to reset their password.

The user account type can also be changed to any other type like – administrator, power user, limited account, guest etc.. You may want to know how to ( a basic from of parental control that is built in XP)

Parental Control is one thing that parents in our part don’t know about but parents in the West cry for. A good Parental Control software is essential for any home PC. But till Vista, no version of Windows had any sort of parental control. To set up a parental control we need to use multiple utilities available in XP together.

The most important part is the user access time restriction. Although you can’t control the total time a user logs in, you can set time limits and make XP shutdown automatically at a particular time. You can also restrict the time a user is allowed to log in.

The option is available through the Command Prompt by net user command. The net command is one among the most powerful and useful commands available in Windows XP command prompt. It allows an Administrator to do and automate many system administrative task. Here is an example where a user named : Others with password : Ajith is restricted to log in during 12PM to 1PM on my PC

net user Others ajith /times:Su-Sa,3-15;Sa,9-12;net user Others ajith /times:all

To clear all restrictions just type : net user [account name] [Password/*] /times:all

What will happen if the user tries to login during the hours other than specified in the command. Well the user will be given a wrong password error. When I tried to run a program as the restricted user after loging in to Administrator the following error message was shown :

Error shown during restricted hours.

This is a brief summary about the net user commands on Microsoft Knowledge Base :

Net user

Adds or modifies user accounts or displays user account information.

Syntax

net user [UserName [Password | *] [options]] [/domain]

net user [UserName {Password | *} /add [options] [/domain]]

net user [UserName [/delete] [/domain]]

Parameters

UserName : Specifies the name of the user account to add, delete, modify, or view. The name of the user account can have as many as 20 characters.

Password : Assigns or changes a password for the user’s account. Type an asterisk (*) to produce a prompt for the password. The password is not displayed when you type it at the password prompt.

/domain : Performs the operation on the domain controller in the computer’s primary domain.

options : Specifies a command-line option. The following table lists valid command-line options that you can use.

Microsoft KB : Full options of net user command. You can Add/ Remove a user account, control all the aspects of an account and time restrict user log in using the net user command.

The times can be specified in increments of 1 hour. If you need to specify multiple times for different days you can use” /time:” option many times. The nest step would be to automatically shutdown the computer when the allowed time is over. This will be explained in the next post.