If you have a computer like mine, with dozens of things installed , Windows startup time tends to be very slow. My old laptop takes a full 10 minutes to fully boot up with everything loaded. So I just press the Power button every morning, and go get myself a cup of whatever. But think of the frustration I have if I had to come back to my laptop to login before it continues to load those 1001 other files and programs. That’s where a trick for auto-logging on to Windows comes handy. There are few ways to do it, one of the simplest way is to use the Microsoft TweakUI powertoy (click the Tweakui.exe link on the right side of the page). However it does not work 100% if you laptop displays a legal notice/messages upon login, especially when you have joined your company’s network domain. Therefore, I am sharing the sure-fire way here. You will need to modify the Windows Registry.

Here’s the registry settings to be modified:

1. In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon ,

a. Add/edit the String key called ‘AutoAdminLogon’. Enter the value ‘1’ here.

b. Add/edit the String key called ‘DefaultUserName’. Enter your login username here.

c. Add/edit the String key called ‘DefaultDomainName’. Enter your name of the network domain that you logon to here.

d. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticecaption’, edit and clear the text.

e. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticetext’, edit and clear the text.

2. In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system ,

a. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticecaption’, edit and clear the text.

b. If there is a key called ‘legalnoticetext’, edit and clear the text.

That’s it. Now try restart Windows and go get yourself a cup of whatever.

UPDATE 28 Mar 2009
It seems that the above method is still not good enough, especially in a Domain environment, where the domain administrator can tweak a setting to automatically set the legal notice caption upon Windows restart. To overcome this, all you need to do is to disable the 'Remote Registry' in the Windows Service. You may be asking whether it's safe to do that. From my past few months experience, disabling this yields no side-effect at all. In fact, I feel safer with this service disabled. Think about this - why would you want to let someone change your registry setting from somewhere else ?