Recently a client of mine adopted 2 new Vista laptops for use in the office domain which is run by a Win2k3 Server box. Many powerful features are available when a computer/user is joined to an Active Directory domain. Most of which I won't get into now.

The users of the new Vista laptops did need heightened permissions to install programs and the like, however I still wanted them to remain normal domain users in the AD. In Windows XP it was as easy as logging on as a local admin, running MMC and adding a domain user to the local administrators group. You would be able to browse the AD by selecting the "Locations..." button, however in Vista I found that it would ONLY show the local machine name, with no option to browse the domain which the laptop was joined to.

Anyways, after some hunting around, Manoj Nagpal's Blog lead me to the answer which can be accomplished via this simple CMD string:

Hopefully you found this quicker than it took me to write it, and your problems are now solved. Remember to run the above command as a user with administrative privileges of course.

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article tags: microsoft, servers, vista