How To Disable and Bypass Lock Screen on Windows 8.1 and 10

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Windows 10 Lock Screen 600x334 - How To Disable and Bypass Lock Screen on Windows 8.1 and 10

First introduced in Windows 8, the Lock Screen is an upsized version of the lock screen originally on Windows Phone. It’s got improved in Windows 10 with the beautiful spotlight pictures powered by the Bing search. The lock screen looks pretty and makes sense for having it around on a tablet computer like Microsoft Surface but it is also quite pointless to have it on a traditional desktop. For those who don’t like the idea having another window floating around before the login screen, it would be nice to see the login screen right after the boot without having to click to pass a screen.

Fortunately, it’s a quite simple task to do. Thanks to Paul Thurrott for sharing this tip. Basically, you need to disable it through Local Group Policy.

1. Open Local Policy Editor, by pressing Win + R, typing gpedit.msc, and pressing Enter.

2. Navigate to

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Control Panel -> Personalization

3. Double-click the entry called “Do not display the lock screen”, and select Enabled.

4. Click OK to close the window. The change will take effect immediately.

Disable Lock Screen thumb - How To Disable and Bypass Lock Screen on Windows 8.1 and 10

To test out, you can simply lock the screen by pressing Win + L keyboard shortcut. Instead of showing the pretty Lock Screen, it displays the Sign-in screen ready for you to sign in.

For those who like messing with the Registry, you can do the same with Regedit as well. You will need to create a new key in the following location and name it as Personalization.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

Then create a DWORD 32 Value NoLockScreen and set as 1.

6 COMMENTS

  1. This doesn’t work for me. I added my exchange email and it now requires logon each time I wake. This destroys the experience of a tablet. Changing the policy doesn’t work once you add exchange

  2. Doesn’t really work if you have multiple users. It takes you to the login screen for the last logged in user instead of the login screen for all users.

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