Is there a simpler way to log into a local account on a domain workstation?

Question

Occasionally I need to log into a local machine account on a Windows workstation joined to our domain. The syntax for specifying a domain account looks like this:

DOMAINNAME\myusername

whereas the syntax for logging into a local account is

HOSTNAME\myusername

The problem is that I often don't know the host name off the top of my head. It is possible to find out by clicking the "How do I log onto another domain" link, but this requires me to memorize or write down an often cryptic hostname. Is there another, simpler way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use a period to represent the local host name when logging in.

So ".\Administrator" would be the local administrator account.

This works in 2008 and 7, not sure about Vista and earlier.

Hope that helps...

Answer 2

Weird? On our win 7 machines, all you have to do is type the account name "Administrator" and it automatically knows you want to logon locally! I will have to try th eperiod thing though.....