Simple Registry Trick To Hide An User Account In Windows
If you are a Windows 7, Vista or XP user, you must be aware that you can create multiple administrator accounts as well as standard user accounts on your system. If a computer has many user accounts created on it, Windows Operating System displays a Welcome Screen which has all the user accounts listed to allow users to select a preferred user account and login.
A display of all user accounts on your Windows Welcome Screen may eventually affect the security of your system, especially if you wish to keep some of your user accounts hidden. However, it is possible that you make your admin account or any other standard user account hidden, so that it is not visible on Windows Welcome Screen.
For creating an admin/ user account, you need to access “Control Panel” and click on “User Accounts” option in Windows XP or access “Control Panel”, then go to “User Accounts & Family Safety” and click on “User Accounts” if you are Windows Vista/ Windows 7 user.
If you already possess an account on the system and just need to make it hidden or invisible from Windows Welcome Screen, simply follow the below mentioned steps.
- Open the Registry Editor.
- Look for the registry key below mentioned:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
If you are unable to find the registry keys “UserList” and “SpecialAccounts”, you need to create new sub-keys and name them as “UserList” and “SpecialAccounts”.
- Now select the registry key “UserList” and right-click on any empty space within the right window pane. Select the option “New” from the right-click context menu and then from the “New” sub-menu select “DWORD (32-bit) Value”.
- Name the newly created DWORD value with the name of your user account which you need to hide.
For instance, if your account User ID is “John”, the registry value has to be named as “John”.
- Now, double-click on the DWORD value and set its value data as “0” for hiding the account on Windows Welcome Screen.
If you wish to make the user account visible on Windows Welcome Screen anytime in future, you simply need to delete this registry value or change its value data from “0” to “1”.
- Close the Registry Editor and restart your PC.
Whenever, you want to logon to your system using the hidden user account, you need to press Ctrl+Alt+Del, which will display the Windows Logon dialog. You need to manually type in the username and password of the hidden account to logon.