Disable Lock Screen on Windows

Here is how you can Disable the Lock Screen on Windows

Since the introduction of Windows, it has gone through quite a few iterations. While some  of them have been for the better, like the immensely popular Windows 7, others haven’t been as well-received, like the Metro-UI based Windows 8. Microsoft backtracked with the touch-centric Windows 8 concepts when it introduced Windows 10 by bringing back a lot of things that were great about the previous versions of Windows, including the Start button.

However, some concepts from the metro-inspired Windows UI still managed to make their way into Windows 10, including the lock screen. The touch-inspired lock screen is basically an extra swipe you have to do every time you try to unlock your PC before it takes you to the actual login screen to choose the user account and password.

It displays a wallpaper along with the clock and requires you to swipe up to access the login screen. It is a concept borrowed from the smartphone world where we routinely check the lock screen to check the notifications and/or time but on a laptop, it doesn’t serve any purpose. So we suggest that you completely turn this feature off, thanks to a configuration option in the Windows Registry.

The Windows Registry Editor is a powerful tool built into Windows and is a collection of databases that store configuration settings for everything from the operating system to other software programs to user preferences, etc. It is a hub for accessing configuration details for all programs on the computer and can be used to make some pretty serious changes to how your computer functions.

The best thing to do before you make any changes is to make a backup, so if you make any undesired changes, you can quickly revert without causing any permanent harm. You can do it using our guide over here.

Disable Lock Screen Using Registry Editor

Here is how you can disable the Lock Screen in Windows using the Windows Registry Editor tool,

  1. Press the Start button and search for regedit and click on the first search result to open the Registry Editor, as shown in the screenshot below.
  2. Go to the following path,
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

  3. Right-lick on Windows from the left pane, as shown in the screenshot below, and click on New and Key to create a new key within Windows.
  4. Rename it Personalization and click on the key to access its contents.
  5. Right-click anywhere in the right-pane to create a DWORD (32-bit) Value.
  6. Rename the Value NoLockScreen.
  7. Open the value by double-clicking on it and set the Value data to 1.
  8. That’s it.

For applying the changes, it’s better to restart our PC once. If you have done it right, you shouldn’t see the lock screen and Windows should directly take you to the login screen.

If you want to revert, you can simply go to the same path and delete the NoLockScreen value you created earlier.