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I have a laptop running windows 7 pro that is joined to a domain. I use the laptop for home and work stuff, and to keep the two separate I login to a domain account at work and a local machine account at home.
Unfortunately, the UI in Windows 7 for switching between users in this situation is... painful. It works for home-only users, because every account has a nice large button you can easily click (you don't even need to log out). It works for most domain computers because you generally only log in to the domain. But in this situation, where I'm changing between domain and local almost every time I log in, it just doesn't work.
I particularly don't like having to type out the machine name when changing to the local login, but I'm also annoyed that I have to go through two screens just to get that far in the first place. I'm hoping there's a registry hack or something that will trigger the old WinXP-style login prompt, because then it's just two extra keystrokes to switch from domain to local or vice versa.
As a side issue, I recently became the network admin a small college. The network I inherited has set up the users to have administrator access with their normal account on the machine issued to them. This was a popular policy, and therefore something that's difficult to fix. I would like to set up something for my users (especially those with laptops) where they only have administrator access when logging in to their local account. Their e-mail and erp app would be tied to the domain login, keeping them from running as administrator most of the time but still allowing that access when they need/want it. But few of them would know enough to be able to type the computer name to gain access to the local account, making this a non-starter.
Any ideas on a better way to switch back and forth?
Joel Coehoorn
Posted 2010-08-04T01:50:51.973
Reputation: 26 787