Hey everyone! I'm a first-time poster here and dealing with an annoying issue regarding local admin passwords retrieved from Intune. While pulling the device admin password works fine, the problem lies in some characters that are super hard to distinguish. For instance, the capital "I" looks just like a lowercase "l", and it's even worse with characters like "B" vs "8" or "1" vs "l" vs "I". It's quite a hassle, especially when you're in a rush or assisting someone remotely. Has anyone else faced this issue or found any clever workarounds? I know about the option of using remote desktop to copy and paste, but if there's a built-in setting that could help, I'd love to hear about it!
6 Answers
If possible, switching to passphrases is the way to go! It makes reading passwords way easier. You can also set a password complexity that improves readability, by eliminating certain confusing characters. It would help with your issue!
I found that changing the font to Consolas in Notepad helps a lot with distinguishing similar-looking characters. Just be aware that Notepad saves unsaved files between sessions by default now.
Is there any policy available that can eliminate some of those confusing characters from the passwords?
I usually copy the password into Notepad and change the font to something larger with serifs because, well, I'm getting old! It makes it a lot easier to read those tricky characters.
Courier New is my go-to font for this exact kind of issue.
Exactly! Just changing the font can make a huge difference.
Can’t you just copy and send clipboard keystrokes through your remote session? That might make it easier. Just be cautious; we’ve blocked copy/paste for UAC due to security reasons, though.
Yeah, we had to restrict that too for security purposes.
This might not answer your question directly, but if all your clients upgraded to Windows 11 24H2, you could start using passphrases instead. It's way easier than decoding those tricky passwords! I had the same struggle until I made the switch.
Totally agree! Using passphrases made my life so much better once I switched.
I heard there’s a setting for reducing character sets too, which can really help.

Yeah, I do the same! Pasting it into Notepad really helps.