Quick Tip: Change the Windows User Password via Command Line
Are you an administrator on the Windows operating system with multiple user accounts? Have you forgotten the password to one of those accounts and you are locked out? Then, provided you are the administrator, you can reset the password from the command line.
To open the Windows command line, just go to your start menu then choose “run” (or press your Windows key and then press R). Then in the box that pops up, type cmd and press enter.
In the black box that comes up, type net user then enter. This will give you a list of all your Windows accounts on that computer.
To change the password for one of these accounts is very simple. Say the Windows account name is asks and you want to change the password to mypa$$word then you just need to type the following :
- net user asks mypa$$word
After pressing enter, you should then get a message saying “the command completed successfully”. That means the password has now been changed and you can now log into that account.
(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, writer and English tutor. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net
“TO THE EARLIER COMMENTER”
I am pretty sure I had approved your comment earleir but for some reason it’s not here.
I must have mistakenly set it to ‘delete’ instead of ‘approve’. Sorry … 
You know an even easier way to change/reset user passwords? start > run > control userpasswords2.
that only works if you already know the password for the account. This is useful if you forgot the password, or need to get into an account you normally do not have access to
Cool… Exactly what I needed to know just now.
I have to reset the local admin passwords on all our PCs, and this will make scripting it dead easy.