Vista Home Premium Lockout Threshold and Lockout Duration
Modifying the Lockout Threshold and Lockout Duration in Vista Home Premium is a chore, as the Group Policy manager is not included with this edition of the operating system. This is quite an oversight, as setting a lockout threshold allows you to keep folks from repeatedly entering guesses into a login screen—an important setting when traveling with a laptop.
I found successful references to the command line command "net accounts" for adjusting the password expiration, but was initially unable to adjust the lockout settings. There are no useful/relevant command line or registry setting for these policies in the Group Policy spreadsheet, published by Microsoft.
There is an article in the depths of the MS support Web site titled 'Undocumented "Net Accounts" Switches', which describes how to set these parameters via the command line, but there is no documentation that these switches will work in Vista, or even XP.
However, using an elevated command prompt (right-click on the Command Prompt icon and select 'Run as Administrator'), I was able to configure the lockout threshold policy setting (but not the lockout duration or window). The following commands are documented as available in Windows 2000/NT, but still seem to be somewhat valid in Windows Vista:
NET ACCOUNTS
Displays the current configuration
NET ACCOUNTS /LOCKOUTTHRESHOLD:
This parameter allows you to configure the number of failed logon attempts before the account is locked. The range is 1 to 999.
NET ACCOUNTS /LOCKOUTDURATION:
This parameter specifies the number of minutes accounts remain locked before automatically becoming unlocked. The range is 1 to 99999.
NET ACCOUNTS /LOCKOUTWINDOW:
This parameter lets you configure the maximum number of minutes between two consecutive failed logon attempts before an account is locked. The range is 1 to 99999.
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