W2K - clean up for use at home.

[Rory]

Now I've got my shiny new T43, I was allowed to keep my old W2K laptop (for $25).
However it's still got my work domain account/password etc on it. I just want to use it as a single user machine at home. I can log in as a local user (different password), so can I just delete the unrequired accounts, or is it more complicated than that?
I'm scared of doing something which would mean I can't login!

[GomJabbar]

I think you need to log on as Administrator to do that. If you don't have the Administor password to log on as Administrator, try and get it from your employer.

Also, if they have set up a Supervisor password for the BIOS, you should try and get that as well. You may desperately need the Supervisor password someday.

If your employer will not tell you the passwords needed (because perhaps they use the same passwords elsewhere), see if you can give it to the IT department so that they can remove the passwords for you.

EDIT: Sometimes Power On passwords, and Hard Drive passwords are set. Try to get the IT department to remove all passwords.

[Rory]

Thanks for that - I didn't give the full details before, but suffice to say that the employer doesn't exist anymore

I have full access to the machine, and there are no bios/HDD passwords.
Although I have Administrator access, there also seems to be a separate Administrator account, which is the only thing I don't have the password for.

Anyway, I used the Network setup wizard and told the machine it was in a home network (not a Domain) and that i was the only user. That seems to have done the trick.

The only thing I'm unsure about now, is that there are a bunch of other user accounts - any idea if I can simply delete those?

[GomJabbar]

When I set up my own ThinkPad with Windows XP Pro, it started out with one Administrator account, and that was it. I changed the name on the Administrator account, but instead it appears that it created a new Administrator account with the new name. So now I have the original Administrator account and the one I created. It turns out that the password is the same for both. I never use the original Administrator account. I do everything in the Administrator account I created.

IMO, deleting a user should be no problem on your T43.

[davidspalding]

OP: if your own account is included in the local Administrators group (run COMPMGMT.MSC, browse to Users and Groups) you ought to be able to just change the password for the built-in administrator. I would do that ANYWAY, so that you have it.

And you can create your own SYSMGR (my fav) account which is a local administrator. Then take the system out of the domain and into workgroup WORKGROUP (or whatever your home LAN is called).

Reboot, login as one of the new local admins, and create yourself a new user for yourself (also a member of the admin group, I'd suggest). Unless you need to retrieve files, Favorites, etc., from your work acount, you can delete the old DOMAIN\olduser accounts and their files (again, in COMPMGMT.MSC).

If this is unfamiliar to you, you owe yourself a trip to the bookstore for a book on basic Windows 2000 administration. It will save you some headaches.

[XCoalMiner]

I might be mistaked on this, but I believe once you select Domain security in Windows -- once your computer joins a domain -- you cannot revert back to workgroup security, you have to reload the OS to do that.

[Rory]

I might be mistaked on this, but I believe once you select Domain security in Windows -- once your computer joins a domain -- you cannot revert back to workgroup security, you have to reload the OS to do that.

Not sure what you mean by 'security' but I did change it back to workgroup simply by using the network wizard. It removes the domain 'connection' as soon as you select Workgroup. (I think this is something that people often do when they take their work laptops home - then their IT department has to fix it again!).

I am somewhot confused by the difference between 'users' and 'profiles' but what I did was to make a clone of the HDD (in case I messed up) and then I pretty aggressively removed stuff that I didn't seem to need. Once I'd got down to a basic set of users, I customised the 'Rory' one, and it seems fine now.

[XCoalMiner]

Past experience, all based on Win 2000 Workstation, is that when a machine was made a member of a domain (think this is called a resource domain), and you are logged into machine as a network domain user, and you then use the My Computer > Properties > Computer ID tab to change to workgroup security, that is a one way thing.

To take machine back to domain security required reinstallation of the OS, and logging into domain with valid credentials. Here's where it gets unclear for me, but I understood that was not something a corporate IT dept cooked up with tweaks to a corporate OS image, it was a hard security thing in the OS.

This was all pre-active directory domains, and pre Win XP. Maybe it's changed?

[davidspalding]

I might be mistaked on this, but I believe once you select Domain security in Windows -- once your computer joins a domain -- you cannot revert back to workgroup security, you have to reload the OS to do that.

You can change around all you like, in the Network Identification tab of System Properties (SYSDM.CPL); you DO NOT have to reinstall Windows (NT4/2000/XP) just to rejoin a domain. You DO need to be a domain admin, or have that specific right, to put a workstation back IN a domain, though. I do this every few days with some Virtual PCs that my team tests software with.

Perhaps that's what you remember.... Or Outlook 2000: you had to reinstall if you wanted to change from "Corporate" (sExchange Server) to "Internet" (SMTP and POP3 support).

[XCoalMiner]

I said it backwards in my first post. It was when going from Domain > Workgroup security, if we ever wanted to go back to Domain security again, had to have the OS reinstalled, the corporate OS image.

It happened to me and some coworkers a few times. I had to have my work pc re-imaged once because of this. It was back in 2000/01, when routers for home networks were first starting to be used, (we were all stumped as to how to get a work laptop to network with a home PC and a home router) and VPN/IPsec was coming into use.

But, we were all 'assured' by our then IT dept this was not a corporate image issue, it was a Windows 2000 'feature'. I had a hard time believing it then, and I vaguely recall reading something confirming what the IT guys said. But still found it hard to believe.

[davidspalding]

[emphasis added]
... It happened to me and some coworkers a few times. I had to have my work pc re-imaged once because of this. It was back in 2000/01, when routers for home networks were first starting to be used, (we were all stumped as to how to get a work laptop to network with a home PC and a home router) and VPN/IPsec was coming into use.

But, we were all 'assured' by our then IT dept this was not a corporate image issue, it was a Windows 2000 'feature'. I had a hard time believing it then, and I vaguely recall reading something confirming what the IT guys said. But still found it hard to believe.

As well you should have. Unless there's a domain policy that can be imposed, they were full of #(*%. You *can* have a workstation rejoin a domain, and I do it all the time. Really. In my company, IT has given the DOMAIN\Testers group the policy right to add systems to the domain, because we're creating and launching test systems all the time ... and we take our test servers in and out of the domain regularly.

The IT guys probably just found it easier to re-image the machine which also sort of "punishes" the user. "See what you did? See what you messed up? Hope you learned your lesson." Imaging takes all of a few minutes, and probably clears up any other 'damage' a user has wrought, which is easier than troubleshooting.