The Whole Story

These days it seems as though everybody is a computer security expert, or needs to be anyway. Picking a good strong password is always a challenge, and there are many online services that will generate you a very strong password with letters, numbers, misc characters ($%*&#@!), etc, but did you know Windows XP has a built-in password generator of its own?

The folks over at Microsoft didn’t really make this feature very obvious to find, namely as it is more of a computer administrator tool than for something a ‘regular joe’ would need, but I don’t understand why. Something like this would be very useful, especially if you share a single PC, or have a number of computers on a network which contain sensitive data, or with the potential for its security to be breached.

So, how do you find and use it? Simple:

• Go to Run on the Start menu and type ‘cmd’ (without the quotes)
• A DOS (’esque) command prompt window will open.
• At the command prompt type ‘net user administrator /random’ (without the quotes)

Based upon Windows XP’s on security rules, it will generate you a fairly solid password for you to use, that will at least be harder to crack than an egg on a sunday morning!

Enjoy!