You might be terrified or anxious about people hacking into your computer and gains access to your confidential data. To avoid unauthorized access, you may have set a password in your Windows ^[1] XP account that you can remember easily. Even with a password set, hackers on the internet can break into your account and get access to your files. So, what do you have to do now? You better set a blank password or use no password at all.

Yes! Using a blank password (or no password at all) can make your computer more secure. Accounts on Windows XP that are not secured by a password, cannot be accessed remotely over the network or the Internet.

An official guide from Microsoft on Password strength ^[2] suggests using blank passwords on Windows XP machines when the following criteria are met:

• You only have one computer or you have several computers but you do not need to access information on one computer from another one
• The computer is physically secure (you trust everyone who has physical access to the computer like your family members)

However, using blank password (or no password at all) is not always a good idea particularly when a computer is not in a secure location. For instance, your laptop is not physically secure so, setting up a strong password ^[3] is a must!

P.S. Running the command gpedit.msc in the Run box and disabling the setting “Limit local account use of blank passwords to console login only” available under Local Policies will allow youto access your XP Professional computer over the network ever after the password is blank