How to Login Locally on Windows 7 without Specifying Hostname

Just a quick tip for today. I found my self fixing a problem earlier that required I logged out as a user and back in as an admin and back in as a user to test etc… Although the Windows 7 PC was attached to a domain, I didn’t want to log in with a domain account. Instead, I had two local accounts set up. One in the admin group and the other in the users group.

The typical way of not logging in to the domain is by entering the following in the username box:

hostnameusername

After a while this can get a little tedious, especially as the hostname was a mix of country and serial number. A quick work around is to simply type in:

.username

Putting the . before the username instructs Windows 7 to log the user in locally rather than on to the domain.

I figured if you run in to the same problems sometime that this might be of benefit to you.

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