MG

The problem

I have a few Windows 7 Home Premium machines at home which I network together. I don’t use HomeGroups yet, and may not in the near future but I do keep some resources on the network that each machine has to access. Windows 7 Home Premium (and lower) does not remember credentials for other Windows machines (if you click the “Remember this password” checkbox in many authentication dialogs, Windows will not remember them and re-use them on next logon) so this becomes a problem when you are using service accounts to access shared media across machines (I don’t have an Active Directory domain at home).

The workaround/solution

My old solution was to create a service account on the machines needing to access the shared resources and hide the service account from view on each machine.

My new solution is to use the Windows Credentials Manager (in the Start Menu, search for “Manage Windows Credentials”). This will bring you to the Operating System’s Credential Manager, where you can Add a Windows credential. From this window, type in the server name and local username and password that authenticates on that server (like your service account) and click on OK.

Windows will now use those credentials whenever it tries to authenticate against that machine.

All you need to do now is to remember to change the password here whenever you change it on your servers for your service accounts.