Log in to a domain

[mrdan]

Hi there guys,

I am new here and am after a bit of help, we have recently migrated our primary school to windows 7 however the annoying part of having to type to log on every time eg

domain\user

is there any other way like XP was with the drop down box........... or am i out of options and have to go around to each computer with the young kids that wont understand

 

[Desslok]

Does only one kid need to login to each computer?
Go to start(Windows icon bottom left) and run Regedit, then navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Policies \System]
DontDisplayLastUserName = 1.

Change to 1 to a 0 then close Regedit.

That should show the last user logged in and just be able to enter poassword, as long as you don't have a policy that will revert it back to 1.

You can also try going to :[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Windows NT \CurrentVersion \Winlogon and for DefaultDomainName enter your domain. You can alos set a default logon and disable forcing Ctrl Alt Delete to logon.

 

[mrdan]

Unfortunatly the computers are going to be used by multiple users therefor this will not work correct?

 

[WindowsStar]

You should not have to enter domain\username unless the domain name and the local name are the same. (i.e. Administrator). When I log in as Administrator the workstation assumes it is the LOCAL Administrator so I have to enter domain\Administrator. However when I log on with my account WindowsStar since there is NO local account with that name it logs in with the domain account. Does the user have a LOCAL account on the computer with the same name, if so that is the reason for having to log on as domain\username? Remove the local account and all will work as expected.

 

[ultraplanet]

Mine works the other way around WindowStar. I have a local account that doesn't exsist on the domain and if I just type it without putting the local machine name in front I can't logon using the local account.

 

[haxcid]

the only reason you would need to prefix the log in acct would be if you are logging into a different domain than the one the machine is in. This also only works if there is a trust relationship set between the 2 domains.

I would take your machines, pull them out of the domain, delete the computer accounts out of AD, sysprep the machines to reset the SID and add it back into the domain.

From your post, you sound a lot like a teacher. You might want to call your district IT department. For assistance. You will need the unattended.xml file your staff created for windows 7 so you can run sysprep properly.

I am an IT guy in a 18000 user, 8000 PC, 9 high school school district.

 

[WindowsStar]

Are you mulit-domained???

If you have several domains you will have to put domain\username if your computer is connected to say domain1 but your account is on domain2. In that case you will have to put domain2\username. But again if you have the right trusts between the domains you will not have to do that just the plain username will work.

Ok with that said there is another catch. If say you have a user domain1\David and a user domain2\David then the computer will use the name of the domain it is authenticated to and it may be the wrong David, so then you will be forced to use domain2\David to log in.

We try to keep all domain names across all domains unique to avoid this.

I have never seen this be reversed as you state it is.

I would try removing 1 computer from the domain and then adding it back to see if that fixes the problem.

Another thing I thought of is that you could put a Policy in place in AD to force you to enter the domain to log in. Someone may have done that so you would always authenticate to the correct DC.