

For more information, see How to back up and restore the registry in Windows. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. You can disable the machine account password changes on a workstation by setting the DisablePasswordChange registry entry to a value of 1. If that is a problem, you can leave the password of the machine account as the default. If you frequently do a clean installation of Windows NT or Windows 2000, you must have an administrator on the domain that can create the machine account on the domain. In this case, the only way to share the same machine account between the two installations of Windows NT or Windows 2000 is to use the default machine account password that is created when you join the domain. You have two separate installations of Windows NT or Windows 2000 on the same computer in a dual-boot configuration. You can disable automatic machine account password changes to reduce replication occurrences. As a side effect of automatic machine account password changes, a domain with many client computers and domain controllers can cause replication to occur on a frequent basis. You want to reduce replication occurrences. You may want to disable the default automatic machine account password changes for any one of the following reasons: If someone discovers a password, he or she can potentially perform pass-through authentication to the domain controller. If you disable machine account password changes, there are security risks because the security channel is used for pass-through authentication.
