my first thread, yay me anyway, type "change password at the command line" into your favourite search engine. lots of results yeah? all of them saying "net user <username> <newpassword>" what they don't tell you is that youre not CHANGING your password, youre RESETING your password - same thing as using lusrmgr.msc - with all the nasty sideeffects of that. it also requires admin privs even to change your OWN password (see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771690(v=ws.11).aspx for details) so im like "screw that" and went for a walk through the guts of windows. couple of hours later I had this vbscript: Code: ' change these username = "bear_aussie" oldpass = "0ldP@ssw0rd" newpass = "n00p455WorD" ' do the work set user = getobject("WinNT://./" & username & ",user") on error resume next call user.changepassword(oldpass, newpass) if err.number = 0 then wscript.echo "success!" else wscript.echo "failed! error code: " & hex(err.number) end if afaict, this script does the same thing as changing your pw from winlogon (ctrl+alt+del menu) - correct me if im wrong enjoy peeps
see "additional considerations" in the m$ link supplied (third bullet is the most important): iirc doing a password reset kills all your lsa secrets, that's why it brakes stored passwords, efs, etc