We found it to be a waste of time and since we pay the IT by the hour, any IT staffer we catch wasting our time and money on such efforts gets scolded.
I'm sure there are IT staffers that want all ducks to be in a row but will your company pay for this? Ours will not.
With that out of the way, read http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itpronetworking/thread/5f2442f6-c3e9-4e09-9965-c984cfd60d22/
Remember to remove the old PC from the server first after you change the name as there is cached information.
That is, you can't just name a PC "thisoldpc" if there was another PC of that name without that deletion on the server. And yes, they covered this in the classes on Server Administration.
Bob
Hey Guys,
So we have about 1400 PC's in our environment and when we upgrade a users computer, we would like to keep with our naming convention and use the same PC name. Usually, if we remember, we will change the name of the old PC before we begin working on the new one. However, if we forget, and I send the PC out with a different name such as JohnDoesPC instead of JohnDoePC, even though the old computer is not on the network anymore, I still get an error saying that PC name is already in use.
Here is my troubleshooting this far:
Deleted the old PC from the DC list.
Flushed DNS on new PC
Changed computer name to something abstract and tried original again, still nothing.
Any other ideas?
Thanks,
Aaron
Its frustrating finding the %5 of PC's in the field that have JohnDoe"S"PC or JohnDoe"OLD"PC.

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