How to Change the Local Administrator Password on All Computers in the Domain
If you are a network administrator, the Sysinternals tools should be part of your troubleshooting and management toolkit. Here’s some information from Microsoft on the Sysinternals tool called PsPasswd that is very helpful in resetting local administrator passwords on domain-joined computers.
“Systems administrators that manage local administrative accounts on multiple computers regularly need to change the account password as part of standard security practices. PsPasswd is a tool that lets you change an account password on the local or remote systems, enabling administrators to create batch files that run PsPasswd against the computers they manage in order to perform a mass change of the administrator password.
PsPasswd uses Windows password reset APIs and therefore does not send passwords over the network in the clear. Just copy PsPasswd onto your executable path, and type “pspasswd” with the command-line syntax shown below.”
usage: pspasswd [[\\computer[,computer[,..] | @file [-u user [-p psswd]]] Username [NewPassword]
| computer | Perform the command on the remote computer or computers specified. If you omit the computer name the command runs on the local system, and if you specify a wildcard (\\*), the command runs on all computers in the current domain. |
| @file | Run the command on each computer listed in the text file specified. |
| -u | Specifies optional user name for login to remote computer. |
| -p | Specifies optional password for user name. If you omit this you will be prompted to enter a hidden password. |
| Username | Specifies name of account for password change. |
| NewPassword | New password. If ommitted a NULL password is applied. |
Download this FREE tool from Microsoft here.
