Windows 10 Skip Login: Bypassing the Screen at Startup

Skipping the Login Screen on Windows 10

If you’re the only person using a particular PC and you’re happy to trade a little security for convenience, Windows lets you skip the login screen and boot straight to the desktop.

1. Press Win + R, type netplwiz, and press Enter.
2. Select your user account from the list.
3. Untick “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.”
4. Click OK, then enter your account password once more to confirm.

From then on, Windows will sign that account in automatically at boot. Worth flagging: this stores the account’s credentials so Windows can auto-logon, and it means anyone with physical access to the machine can get straight to the desktop without a password. It’s a reasonable trade-off on a personal machine at home, but we wouldn’t recommend it on a laptop that leaves the house, or on any machine that handles sensitive data or is used by more than one person.

Works Identically on Windows 11

netplwiz is unchanged on Windows 11 — the same dialog, same checkbox, same behaviour, so these exact steps apply whichever version you’re running.

A Safer Way to Store the Credentials: Sysinternals Autologon

The netplwiz method works by writing your password into the registry (DefaultPassword under the Winlogon key) in a lightly-obfuscated but ultimately recoverable form — anyone with local admin access to the machine can read it back out fairly easily. Microsoft’s own free Autologon tool, part of the Sysinternals Suite, achieves the same automatic sign-in but encrypts the stored password using the Windows LSA (Local Security Authority) secrets store instead, which is considerably harder to extract. If you’re setting this up on more than a handful of machines, or you’re at all concerned about the credential being recoverable by another local account, Autologon is the better-engineered option for the same result — download it from Microsoft’s own Sysinternals page, run it once, enter your credentials in its dialog, and it configures the same underlying auto-logon registry values on your behalf. Either way, the same physical-access caveat applies: whoever can reach the keyboard gets to the desktop with no prompt, so treat this as a convenience feature for a trusted, single-user, physically-secured machine only.

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