The World According to Mitch

A lot of changes have been made to Windows 10 over the nearly three years since its release as the last desktop operating system that Microsoft would be releasing.  Some of those changes have been substantive, others purely cosmetic.  Over the last few versions, they have done quite a bit to remove any of the Windows 7 look-and-feel to the operating system, or at least hiding it.  For those of us who have been using Windows for more than thirty years, it is often annoying that something we used to be able to do without thinking now takes a bit of a fight with the operating system in order to achieve.  As an example, it used to be pretty simple to find your WiFi password.  It is still possible in the GUI, but it is much more convoluted… and at that still requires dropping into the ‘Windows 7’ Control Panel in order to achieve.  (See below)

While there is not really a Windows 10 GUI way to glean the same information, there is a command line way to do it.  The command is:

netsh wlan show profile “NETWORK NAME” key=clear

This will result in the following output:

Incidentally, this will not only work for the wireless network that you are currently connected to.  You can use the following command:

netsh wlan show profiles

to show all of the wireless networks that you have connected to, and then use the same command, like so:

(For the curious, the wireless network BELL570 no longer exists, and the password to my iPhone (which is not called Mitch’s iPhone) is not MyPassword.)

So now you see there are still ways to extract your wireless password, even if Microsoft is making it more arduous to do so.