WOAH WOAH WOAH!!! Mario, why would you want to auto login to a system without at least user credentials? Well I’ll tell you trusty reader…its an HTPC with nothing important on it! In the event something happens and a reboot is necessary, I want to be automatically logged in and XBMC to auto load!

Now keep in mind, I have enabled the Administrator account on this setup (Local Users and Groups from the Computer Management menu) for other purposes as well as not set a password for the main user account (playme) which is what needs to auto login.

**NOTE: **This is the same method as in XP which also works for Vista, 7, and maybe 8?

1) Launch Run from windows and type “control userpasswords2?

2) Untick the box that says “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.”

3) Click Apply and a prompt should come up asking you for the user (and its credentials) that you want to auto login when the system is started.

And thats it! Reboot and your system should automatically login.

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.