How to recover a WiFi password in Windows Ten and Windows Eleven
Hi, everyone, I'm Leo Notenboom for askleo.com. Here's the question.
I connected my WPA protected WiFi network ages ago.
I can't remember the password.
How do I figure out what it is?
This is one of those cases where even
though for accounts and login accounts, we keep harping on the fact that your
provider can't tell you your password, you can only change it.
This is a case where Windows will happily
tell you the password that you've used for wireless connections now and in the past.
First we have to talk about
the traditional approach for solving this problem.
The traditional approach to forgetting
the password is to change the password, not unlike many of those services.
You log into your router, your WiFi access point,
you set a new WPA password, and then you run around to all of your
devices who are now suddenly disconnected because the password changed and give them
the new password so that they could reconnect it's solid.
It works.
It's a bit of a pain, and as it turns out, it's actually not really necessary.
Here's how you do it.
Here's my laptop.
We are looking at... This is Windows Ten, if I'm not mistaken.
It's hard to tell sometimes,
and we're going to do all of this in the command prompt.
The reason I'm using the command prompt
for this is simply because the user interface for this specific
function changes from time to time, certainly between Windows Ten and eleven,
whereas the command line that we're going to use is really the same between the two.
The very first thing we're going to enter
here, and you don't even need to be administrator for this.
netsh wlan show profile
for wide local area networking.
netsh wlan show profile
So what it's listing now
are the wireless hotspots that I have
connected to on this machine that have been remembered.
That's part of the issue.
We need to make sure we're choosing the correct network to see the password.
Then the next thing we do, we start with the same command.
netsh wlan show profile
this time we include the profile name.
Now I'm going to put mine in quotes
because it has a slash in it, which can sometimes confuse commands.
If I were using the upper one, then I would not necessarily have to use that.
And the important thing here is to say key equals clear.
And what you will see is under key content.
My actual password.
Now I've blocked out my actual password, except maybe for the first letter or two.
But you can see that my actual wireless
password for that network was displayed in clear text.
Now I know the answer to the question.
Here's the password that I need to use to connect to that network.
Now, it's nice to know that this exists,
but honestly, I prefer to save my passwords somewhere else
for reference. I will save them in LastPass typically
there are places for that and if you ever end up clearing the remembered networks
from your windows machine then you're also clearing the remembered passwords and you
would not be able to go back and find out what those passwords were.
So noting the passwords for the networks
you connect to as you connect to them is probably a good thing to do but as
a safety net you can get it from windows directly.
Hope that's helpful.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleocom. Thanks for for watching.