Toggle between work and home network domain under Win7?

Asked by robmandu (21331

) September 25th, 2010

I bring my work laptop home. It runs Win 7 Pro. While my laptop can connect to the internet just fine, it’s unable to talk to any other devices on my local wifi network.

If I ping another computer on my local network by hostname only, Windows automatically attempts to add my work domain to the end.

Ex:)
I type: ping WifesMacBookPro

DOS then replies with: Pinging WifesMacBookPro.<workdomain.com> x7.2xx.1xx.3x

[ Of course, <workdomain.com> and the x’s are just anonymization by me. ]

Obviously, I gotta have this rig working in the office, but I would like to occasionally print and transfer files at home. I considered using the System Properties’ Network ID wizard to change the domain, but figured I better ask around first.

I’d really prefer a simple toggle technique vs. having to run that wizard anyway.

What do you suggest?

—

To be clear, this is not a config problem with my home network. All of my at-home devices can talk to each other just fine.

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1 Answer

I don’t think there’s an easy way of toggling back and forth. And getting back on the domain would require admin privileges (some companies don’t let the workers have that).

I have roughly the same situation, so I just go by IP address. Fer instance, I have drives mapped to my NAS and it works fine, I just had to map to it using the IP address of the NAS instead of the name. You should be able to connect to a printer the same way.

mrentropy (17213

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