I’ve seen a lot of letters and hints recently about turning on your PC and preferably once, i.e turn it on and when you come to it, it’s ready. Unfortunately few computers are set up like this. Most require, sensibly, that you have to provide a logon. This means it is a two step process. 1) Turn on computer, get tea / coffee whilst Windows loads… 2) Log into computer, get tea / coffee whilst your account loads…  Wouldn’t it be great if you could shrink time, but still require a password?

This article will show you how to achieve this simply. We will enable automatic login to your chosen account, e.g yours. Then once logged in it will lock your computer, so you still have to enter your password it is just much quicker! Note: This only works for one user account (probably yours), so all other users will still have to wait if you use a shared PC. Make sure you are an administrator as well!

First disable the first Windows login screen, skip straight to chosen user. To do this go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Run, this will then open a dialog box where you type either netplwiz or control userpasswords2 .

You will be greeted by a charming window showing you the users on the computer. On this screen there is a tiny checkbox for whether you need a username and password to login, uncheck this checkbox, you can then choose which account you want to be logged on automatically, (you will have to enter the account password!) and hey presto. This works, but it means on a shared computer one account is logged in and ready to be used by anyone, whether it be the wife, you, kids or the goldfish.

To prevent this, on logon to this account we will make the computer automatically lock itself, so a password is still needed. To do this, navigate to your login profile by finding Mr. Charming Run Box and typing this time “%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup” (quotes ARE needed). Right click on an empty space in the folder, hover over new, and select shortcut. Type in the prompt box rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation . You can save the shortcut as anything!

The next time you switch on your ever slowing computer, it will immediately turn on, log on, lock the computer and load everything up on your account whilst you finish your cup of tea / coffee. This should save money as now you will only have to have 1 cup of tea / coffee as when you type in your password, your account is preloaded!

Please feel free to comment any experiences you have had with this tutorial!