How to change your Microsoft 365 password and move your email to a new laptop

Two things come up all the time with Microsoft 365 email: a user wants to change their own password and can't figure out where the setting is, and someone gets a new laptop and needs their existing email account moved over. Both are straightforward once you know where to look, but Microsoft doesn't make either one obvious.

Why users can't change their own password by default

In Microsoft 365, the ability for a regular user to change their own password is controlled by the admin — and by default, it's often turned off for standard email users. So the user logs into their account, goes looking for a password change option, and either can't find it or gets an error when they try. It's not them. The setting has to be enabled first at the admin level.

If you're the admin (or you can get in touch with whoever is), here's what needs to happen:

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center at admin.microsoft.com with an admin account.
2. Go to Users > Active users.
3. Find the user, click their name, and open their account details.
4. Look for the setting that controls self-service password reset, or the option to allow the user to change their password. Depending on the license and how the tenant is set up, this may live under Azure Active Directory (now called Entra ID) under Password reset.
5. Enable it for the user or for the group the user belongs to, and save.

Once that's on, the user can change their own password from their account page at myaccount.microsoft.com under Security & privacy > Password. They enter the current password, the new one twice, and they're done.

Changing the password once it's enabled

For the user, once the admin has flipped the switch, the flow is:

1. Go to myaccount.microsoft.com and sign in.
2. Click Change password (either from the main page or under Security & privacy).
3. Enter the old password, then the new password twice.
4. Save.

The new password takes effect immediately. Any device or app that was signed in with the old password — phone mail app, Outlook on another computer, a tablet — will start prompting for the new one the next time it tries to sync.

Moving a Microsoft 365 email account to a new laptop

With a Microsoft 365 account, you're not really moving the email itself — the email lives on Microsoft's servers, not on the laptop. What you're doing is setting up the account on the new machine so it can pull the same mail down. The old laptop had a copy, the new laptop will have a copy, and they'll both stay in sync with the server.

Here's the process using Outlook, which is what most people are on:

1. Install Microsoft 365 (or standalone Outlook) on the new laptop and sign in with the same Microsoft account the license is tied to.
2. Open Outlook. It should prompt you to add an account.
3. Enter the email address and password for the account you're moving.
4. Outlook will connect to the Microsoft 365 server, authenticate, and start downloading the mailbox. Depending on how much mail is in the account, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
5. Once it's done, the inbox, sent folder, calendar, and contacts on the new laptop will match what's on the server — which is what the old laptop had too.

If the account has multi-factor authentication turned on, you'll get a prompt on the user's phone to approve the new device. Approve it, and Outlook finishes signing in.

Before you retire the old laptop

Before you wipe the old machine or hand it off, verify a couple of things on the new one:

• Open the calendar and confirm appointments are showing up.
• Send a test email from the new laptop and make sure it arrives.
• Check that contacts are populated in the address book.
• If the user had local PST files or archived mail stored only on the old laptop (not on the server), copy those over separately — those don't come down automatically because they were never on the server to begin with.

That last point is the one that catches people. Anything stored in a local PST or an archive folder that wasn't synced to the server has to be moved manually — copy the PST file from the old laptop to the new one and open it in Outlook under File > Open & Export > Open Outlook Data File. Everything that was in the cloud comes down on its own; everything that wasn't, you have to bring across yourself.