I have just purchased three Windows 7 Professional Dell 64-bit PCs for testing prior to upgrading our company’s 120+ PCs from Windows XP Professional.

The setup is a standard domain with a Windows Server 2003 32-bit server.

• We name each PC XP1 to XP150 so that when users join or leave, I don’t have to rename the PC.

• We use the Description field to allocate the user’s name to each PC.

• We also have a share set up on each PC using the user’s name.

When I browse the network using Windows Explorer in XP, I get a useful display.

The left pane showing the PC number and the right pane showing NAME and COMMENTS

So, for example I would see:

XP01                 Fred Bloggs

(Each PC on a new row.)

The right pane is my main tool for administering the network.

I can easily see the PC number and the name of the user.

However, in Windows 7, this seems to have been thrown out of the window and replaced with fields that I do not need and in my case always display the same info.

"Name", "Category", "Workgroup", "Network Location"

In my case the Name column gives the PC number (XP10) etc and all three other columns display identical useless information.

So I can’t see who is using XP10.

When I am in “help desk” mode, I would naturally ask the user’s name and use my remote desktop client to view their screen.

The user isn’t aware of their PC name, so I am finding it impossible to match the user name with a PC number.

Any ideas how to overcome this "by design" change to Windows 7?