How to Enable or Disable guest account

Guest accounts allow temporary login on a Windows system without requiring to provide credentials/password. Each system administrator would have a different need on how to configure guest account on their systems. This post explains how to enable or disable guest account on a Windows computer.

Firstly, let’s see how we can check if guest account is enabled/disabled.

How to check if guest account is active

net user command with a string search using findstr helps to know the status of guest account.

net user guest | findstr /C:"active"

Example:

c:>net user guest | findstr /C:"active"
Account active               No

How to enable guest account

Open elevated administrator command prompt and run the below command.

net user guest /active:yes

Example:

C:>net user guest | findstr /C:"active"
Account active               No
C:>net user guest /active:yes
The command completed successfully.
C:>net user guest | findstr /C:"active"
Account active               Yes

How to disable guest account

Here’s the command to disable guest account on any Windows version/edition.

net user guest /active:no

The above commands would work on Windows 7, Windows 8 and also on older versions like XP, Server 2003 etc.

Alternatively, we can enable or disable guest account from GUI using the user management console. Run the command ‘lusrmgr.msc’ from Run window, enter administrator credentials and go to the node ‘Users’ in the console. Open the guest account properties and then select / unselect the check button ‘Account is disabled’.

Is it possible to delete guest account?

If you are never going to use the guest account, you may be thinking to delete it permanently from your system. However, Windows does not allow to delete guest account, for the fact it does not allow deleting any built-in accounts like administrator.
Here’s sample run on my Windows 7 box.

c:>net user guest /delete
System error 1371 has occurred.
Cannot perform this operation on built-in accounts.
c:>