Have you always wanted to save your password in dial-up networking but wondered why the save password box was always “grayed-out?” Well it turns out that its not that hard to allow Windows 95 and 98 to automatically save your password, saving you a great deal of time and saving some memory cells to boot. The following procedure assumes that the reason that you can’t save passwords is the most common reason (about 99% of all the cases are due to this setup error) so if it doesn’t fix your save password problem, I suggest that you post a question on the Windows 9x forum or get a software utility such as DUNCE.
Step one. The first thing that you need to do is click on the start button and open up the control panels. If Windows 98 tells you that you shouldn’t use the control panels unless you know what you are doing, click ok to show the control panels.
Step two. Now that you have the control panels open, double click on the control panel called Network.
Step three. In Network, the first thing that you want to do is make sure that your primary network logon is set to “Windows Logon” and not something else.
Step four. Next you need to add the Client for Microsoft Networks. To do this click on the add button and then select clients. Next choose the Microsoft option and double click on Client for Microsoft Networks. Note: at this time Windows will most likely prompt you for the CD-ROM.
Step five. Click OK and when it asks you if you want to restart your computer click yes.
Now you should be able to check save password. If you are wondering why the “Network Neighborhood” icon is now on your desktop and it wasn’t before, it is because of what you just did. Getting it off without removing the save password option is difficult so I recommend you just leave it there (if you ever get a network it will come in handy). If you really want to get it off, you can use a Microsoft PowerToy called TweakUI to remove the icon from the desktop. In order to find TweakUI, simply do a search at the software search section of Computing.Net.
