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Find all your Wi-fi passwords

It’s all too easy to change your Wi-fi network password from the default then realise you haven’t made a note of the new password. Perhaps you want to reconnect to an old network you haven’t used in a while, but you’ve forgotten the password. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to find the password of any Wi-fi network that your PC is (or has been) connected to.

To find your current network’s password, right-click the Wi-fi icon on your taskbar, click ‘Open Network & Internet settings’, then click the ‘Network and Sharing Center’ link at the bottom. Next, select your Wi-fi’s link at the top, click the Wireless Properties button, the Security tab, then tick ‘Show characters’ to see your password in the ‘Network security key’ field.

To find the passwords of Wi-fi networks that you’ve connected to previously, press the Windows key, type cmd, then press Enter to open the Command Prompt window. Here, type netsh wlan show profile (see screenshot) then press Enter. You’ll see a list of all Wi-fi networks that you’ve ever connected your PC to under ‘User profiles’.

To find the password of any of the Wi-fi networks in the list, type netsh wlan show profile “NETWORK” key=clear (replacing the word NETWORK with the name of the relevant Wi-fi network – see screenshot). Scroll down to the ‘Security settings’ section in the list of commands that appears. Here, check the ‘Key content’ field to see the password for that network.