- 1 year ago
How to autologin by altering Windows Server 2012 R2 registry? "AutoAdminLogon" solution doesn't completely work
To enable autologin on Windows Server 2012 R2, you can modify the registry settings. The "AutoAdminLogon" solution should work, but there are additional steps to ensure that autologin is fully functional. Here's the complete process:
Open the Registry Editor:
- Press Win + R to open the Run dialog.
- Type
regedit
and press Enter to open the Registry Editor.
Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Create or modify the following registry values:
- Set the
AutoAdminLogon
value to1
to enable autologin. - Set the
DefaultUserName
value to the username of the account you want to log in automatically. - Set the
DefaultPassword
value to the password of the user account. - If the
DefaultPassword
value does not exist, create it as a newREG_SZ
(string) value.
- Set the
Optionally, set the
DefaultDomainName
value if the user account belongs to a domain. Set it to the domain name.To avoid the password being displayed in plaintext in the registry, you can use
sysinternals Autologon.exe
utility from Microsoft. It encrypts and stores the password securely.Restart the server for the changes to take effect. Upon reboot, the specified user account should automatically log in.
After making these changes, the server should automatically log in to the specified user account at startup. However, keep in mind that enabling autologin means that the password is stored in the registry in an encrypted form (using reversible encryption). Take appropriate security precautions to protect the registry and server access.
Please note that automatically logging in to an account may have security implications, and it is recommended to use this feature only in controlled environments or on non-production systems.