If you’re a Windows user, you know how to access your account information and settings. But what if you want to change your password without having to enter all of your information again? There’s a way to do this without having to go through the traditional password dialog box. To do this, you can use a shortcut. To create a shortcut to the stored user names and passwords dialog in Windows, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Start menu and type “cmd.”
  2. Type “netstat -an” and hit Enter.
  3. The output will show you all of the active connections on your computer. You’ll see something like this: Active connections (listing 2): C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\UserData C:\Users\username.windowsuserprofiles C:\Users.windowsuserprofiles2 C:\Users.windowsuserprofile3 C:\Users.localappdata

You can add this into your folder of useful shortcuts… sure, you might not use it every day, but it’s good to know how to do it.

Create the Shortcut

Right-click on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

In the location box, enter in the following command, and then on the next page give the shortcut a helpful name.

Once you have the shortcut, you’ll want to right-click on it and choose Properties, then click the Change Icon button on the Shortcut tab.

If you change the textbox value to the following file, you can find the matching icon for the shortcut (adjusting if your Windows is installed elsewhere)

Now you should have a nice matching icon…

Which will open up the Stored User Names and Passwords dialog.

Note that you can also use this to backup and restore your saved passwords, and it should work in either Windows 7, Vista or XP.