If you don’t want to answer security questions when creating a user account, you can enable or disable security questions in Windows 10.
Starting from Windows 10 v1803, Microsoft made it mandatory to set security questions for local user accounts. When you forget the user account password, these security questions will help you reset the password.
However, these security questions can also make the whole user account creation process a bit more hard. If that’s the case, you can disable Windows 10 security questions feature.
After disabling, Windows 10 will no longer ask you to set up security questions while creating new local user accounts.
How Do I Disable Security Questions in Windows 10
To turn off the security questions feature, you can either use the Group Policy Editor or Registry Editor. I will show both methods. Click on the quick links below to go to the method of your choice.
- Group Policy editor (the easy way)
- Registry editor
From the Group Policy Editor (GPO)
To turn off Windows 10 security questions via Group Policy, these are the steps you should follow.
- Open the Start menu.
- Search for “gpedit.msc” and click on the result.
- In the GP Editor, go to “Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Credential User Interface” folder.
- Find and double-click “Prevent the use of security questions for local accounts” policy on the right panel.
- Select “Enabled“.
- Click “Apply” and “Ok” buttons.
- Close GP Editor.
- Reboot Windows.
With that, you’ve disabled the security questions feature.
To enable the security questions for local accounts, follow the same steps but select “Disabled” or “Not configured” in step 5.
From the Registry Editor
To disable security questions via the Registry Editor, follow the steps as shown below.
- Press “Windows Key” to open the Start menu
- Search for “Registry Editor” and click on the results to open it.
- In the editor, go to the following folder.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System - Right-click on the “System” folder.
- Select “New → Dword Value“.
- Name the value as “NoLocalPasswordResetQuestions“
- Double-click on the value you just created.
- Type “1” in the Value Data field.
- Close the Registry Editor.
- Reboot Windows.
After rebooting, Windows 10 will no longer ask for security questions when creating a new local user account.
To enable security questions via the Registry Editor, follow the same steps but set the Value Data to “0” in step five. Alternatively, you can also delete the “NoLocalPasswordResetQuestions” value.
Download .reg files
If you don’t want to manually edit the Registry, download the .reg files liked below and execute them. They will add or remove the “NoLocalPasswordResetQuestions” value for you.
If you want to, you can open the .reg file with Notepad to see its code.
That’s all there is to it. It is that simple to enable or disable security questions in Windows 10.
Keep in mind that the above method will only disable security questions for new account creation. If you already set them for other local accounts, they will stay active.
I hope that helps. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible.