My PC is on a domain, but I connect to many PCs on the same network that are in a workgroup. I obviously have to enter a username and password to connect to them. The trouble is that with Windows 7 the Windows Security box defaults to adding the domain name to the user name I enter, so when I click OK it tries to log on as <DOMAIN>\administrator, instead of just administrator. This obviously fails. I can get round it by typing in the machine name - <Machine name>\administrator, but this is tedious, especially with many auto-generated machine names. How can I turn off adding the domain name? XP didn't do this, and it's completely pointless to me, since any machines that are on the domain I can connect to without entering credentials anyway. I've searched quite a bit, and all I've found is a suggestion to modify the DefaultDomainName value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. This doesn't work.

When trying to logon locally you could just use the following : .\userid (.\administrator). I am not aware of a policy to cancel out the domain logon section entirely.

Well that's not ideal, but it's a lot better than typing the machine name every time. Thanks.

For security reasons, the behavior is changed in Windows 7. We cannot modify it.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

"For security reasons, the behavior is changed in Windows 7. We cannot modify it." What sort of an answer is that? How can it be a security issue? I can still log on to any machine that I want. but it just involves more typing. How on earth does that affect security?

Hi that's fine to use .\userid (.\administrator) locally but what if you want to connect remotely to another pc/NAS without the need to type in the remote computer's name or ip address? For example I've got a Linksys NAS connected to the domain and if I map the drive via ip \\10.10.10.1\disk1 it asks for a username and password, on windows XP there's no predefined "domain:Domain" field so I can just put the NAS local username and password and it authenticates. When I connect to the same NAS on Windows 7 it has a predefined domain so I change this to authenticate via ip 10.10.10.1\username and password but it does not want to authenticate. What's different in Windows 7?