How to Disable Windows 8 Lock Screen
Boot your PC or wake it from sleep, and you go straight to Windows 8’s lock screen, which looks more like the screen you’d expect to see on your smartphone than on a PC. It tells you the time and date, and a variety of timely information—meetings taken from your calendar, updates from social networking sites, an indication of your power level, email notifications, and other similar information.
That’s all very nice, but if you’re on a PC, you probably want to get straight to work. And that means getting to the Start screen faster. If you like, you can bypass the Lock Screen.
To do it, you use the Local Policy Editor. Launch it by pressing
+ R to open the Run dialog box, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter or click OK. The Local Policy Editor launches.
Go to Computer Configuration --> Administrative Templates --> Control Panel --> Personalization. Double-click the “Do not display the lock screen” entry, select Enabled, then press Enter or click OK. Exit the Local Policy Editor, then reboot.
The next turn you reboot or wake your PC, you won’t see the Lock screen. Instead, you’ll go straight into logging into Windows 8.
The Local Policy Editor comes only with Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise. But you can still turn off the Lock screen in any version of Windows 8 by using a Registry hack.
1. Open registry editor by typing regedit into Run dialog box
2. In the Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Personalization
3. Create a DWORD called NoLockScreen
4. Change its value from 0 to 1, exit the Registry Editor, and exit and restart Windows 8.
Note: If you don’t find the Personalization key, you’ll have to create it before creating the NoLockScreen DWORD.
This little trick also works for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 operating systems.
That’s all very nice, but if you’re on a PC, you probably want to get straight to work. And that means getting to the Start screen faster. If you like, you can bypass the Lock Screen.
To do it, you use the Local Policy Editor. Launch it by pressing
+ R to open the Run dialog box, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter or click OK. The Local Policy Editor launches. Go to Computer Configuration --> Administrative Templates --> Control Panel --> Personalization. Double-click the “Do not display the lock screen” entry, select Enabled, then press Enter or click OK. Exit the Local Policy Editor, then reboot.
The next turn you reboot or wake your PC, you won’t see the Lock screen. Instead, you’ll go straight into logging into Windows 8.
The Local Policy Editor comes only with Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise. But you can still turn off the Lock screen in any version of Windows 8 by using a Registry hack.
1. Open registry editor by typing regedit into Run dialog box
2. In the Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Personalization
3. Create a DWORD called NoLockScreen
4. Change its value from 0 to 1, exit the Registry Editor, and exit and restart Windows 8.
Note: If you don’t find the Personalization key, you’ll have to create it before creating the NoLockScreen DWORD.
This little trick also works for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 operating systems.