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Q: Ever since I upgraded to Win10, I am forced to change the password for the administrator account periodically. I use the standard account almost all the time, several times a day. Occasionally, something asks for administrator privilege, and when I try to do so it says my administrator account password has expired and must be changed. It usually isn’t convenient to stop what I’m doing and mess around with changing the admin password. It’s very aggravating. Didn’t have this problem with Win 7. (“Thanks, Bill!” to quote my favorite geek…) Since I seldom use the administrator account, this happens almost every time I log into it. Is there a way to make the password change only when I want to change it?

– William B.
Niceville, Florida

A: There sure is, Bill. In fact, there are a couple of ways, but one of them doesn’t work on certain versions of Windows 10. Unfortunately, that’s the less-technical way, but in order to guarantee this will work, we’ll have to walk the more-technical road to get this fixed for you.

Almost all versions of Windows support a maximum password life, after which the password must be reset. This is mostly intended for managed systems, such as those used at businesses or schools. The main purpose of this is to allow the IT Department to force users to change their passwords on a regular basis. Although the wisdom of this is debatable in this Geek’s opinion, most security experts agree that regularly changing passwords makes the overall system more secure over time.

However, most home users such as yourself do not want to be forced to change their passwords on a regular basis, or ever for that matter, no matter how much of a good idea that might be. This might be a good time to review last week’s edition of I.G.T.M., in which I discussed how unchanged passwords in consumer electronics devices connected to the Internet of Things contributed to the massive cyber-attack that took place back in October. Like all back-issues of It’s Geek To Me, it’s available for free on my website.

But enough background! Let’s get to your fix. You’re going to need a Command Prompt window that’s running with Administrator privileges in order to do this. That means being both signed-into Windows using the Administrator account, and running the Command Prompt with elevated privileges. If you know how to do that, you may skip to the next paragraph. Otherwise, do the following: Log-off, and log back in using your administrator account. Click the Windows Start button, and in the search box, type the words Command Prompt. Rather than pressing Enter, or double-clicking it in the search results, you will instead right-click on it to bring up the context menu. Find the entry that says “Run as Administrator” and click that. You might get a dialog from User Account Control asking you to enter the credentials for an account with Administrator privileges. Do so, and the Command Prompt will come up.

Once you have the privileged Command Prompt window, enter the following command:

net accounts /maxpwage:unlimited

(If you get a response that says something about Access Error 5, you are not running the Command Prompt with Administrator privileges. Go back a couple of paragraphs and try again.)

The keyword “maxpwage” means “Maximum Password Age”, which is measured in days. You can give it a number, but using the word “unlimited” effectively sets the password to never expire. The effect is immediate, so there is nothing to save. You can simply close the Command Window, log-off, and log back on with your standard account, knowing that the next time you need admin privileges, you won’t be bothered with having to reset the password.