When booting up to the logon screen, Windows may notify you that your password will expire in a number of days and ask whether you want to change it now. This behavior can start months after your initial installation of Windows. Its purpose is to help enforce password policies in a business environment, but if you don’t need that enforcement, it can be very annoying. In this tutorial we’ll show you two options to turn off password expiration in Windows 8/7/Vista/XP. The steps are quite simple!

Note: If your password expired and couldn’t remember your Windows password, you need to use a password cracking bootdisk such as Reset Windows Password utility to remove your forgotten password, before following this guide to turn off Windows password expiration.

Option 1: Turn off Password Expiration Through GUI Interface

1. Press Windows + R key combination to bring up the Run box. Type netplwiz or control userpasswords2 and press Enter. The User Accounts dialogue box will appear.
2. Click on Advanced tab in the user account.
3. Click on Advanced button in the Advanced user management window and it will open Local User and Group.
4. Double click the Users Folder in the Local User and Group.
5. Select your user account from the list. Right click on it and then select Properties
6. It will open another window, click on General tab and check the option of Password never expires.
7. Click Apply and then OK.

Option 2: Turn off Password Expiration Using Command Prompt

Open up a Command Prompt as administrator (type “Command Prompt” in the Start search box and instead of just pressing Enter as normal, you right-click the menu item for it and select “Run as administrator”) and type the following command at the prompt:

net accounts /maxpwage:unlimited

and press Enter. That should do it. (If you get access error 5, you didn’t run Command Prompt as administrator.)

Note: If you don’t know how to open up a Command Prompt as administrator in Windows 8, please refer to this article: http://www.top-password.com/blog/how-to-run-an-application-as-administrator-in-windows-8/