May 20, 2008

Changing Passwords for local windows accounts

At work today some of the IT guys were talking about needing to change the local Administrator accounts on a bunch of the computers. They were planning on updating each password manually by going to each computer and logging in. The computers are all part of a domain, but apparently Microsoft hasn't made an easy way to update local machine information like this.

I remembered seeing an article in Microsoft TechNet magazine about how to automate this. I thought it had been windows powershell script, but it wasn't. Once I found the article, it ended up being a visual basic script for Excel. All you need to do is provide a list of computer names, and give it a new password to set. It's not as simple or easy to use as a standalone application, but all of the apps I found didn't look very good, or cost more than they should. If someone knows of a good free application or even better an open source application (maybe C#), let me know.

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