Saturday, March 18, 2017

Windows 10 -- saved wifi password

Recently I came across an interesting issue. I had to reset my router, and as I was in the process of setting up the SSIDs, I realized that I didn't note down password to one of my 2 wifi networks. I figured that thats not an issue since windows remembers all previously connected wifi passwords. Unfortunately I didn't realize that Windows 10 unlike Windows 7 doesn't show you passwords to past remembered networks via GUI. All I could see was a list of wifi networks that I have connected to in the past. Something like this:


When you click on properties, all you get are options to connect automatically or define it as metered connection.

Now, I was trying to setup the router again giving the second network very restricted access. I wanted to make sure that a few devices that connect to that network can continue to connect to it without me needing to reconfigure their passwords. With some research online I found the following command which shows you saved passwords for any previously connected networks. The networks with a space in them can be passed with quotes surrounding them. Here is an example:

netsh wlan show profile name="Linksys 5" key=clear

Here is the output for one of the networks saved on my machine; the password will be visible under Key Content:


This might come handy again.

_O