I'm being pestered by our lab security guy to disable 'password never expires' on my home laptop that I use to connect to work with remotely. Unfortunately he can't tell me how to do it. We found the following on a Windows 7 professional machine:
Start -> All Programs -> Admin tools -> Users and Groups
This gets us to a diaglog where one can set/unset 'password never expires'.
My administrator account on my home computer, running Windows 7 home edition does not have this 'Administrative tools' folder under 'All programs', and Administrative tools under the Control Panel -> Security also doesn't have the 'users and groups' option.
Is there another way to do this? I'd guess it's just a registry setting, but I don't find it with a registry search.
Note that Windows appears to have two controls for password expiry. One is the 'net accounts /maxpwage' which I've set to 90 per our lab security rules. My system doesn't pass the security audit since this 'password never expires' is also selected despite having set /maxpwage (and Windows 7 home edition doesn't externalize a way to change this one that I can find).
I've been guided to a direct method of opening the diaglog that controls this 'password never expires' option. That can be done with 'lusrmgr.msc'. However, this also produces a 'Unsupported in this version of windows'.
Best Answer
The secret mantra turns out to be: