So I've had to deal with renaming whole rooms of PC's before due to them being swapped out and incorrectly named or generally being moved around but I've never settled on a decent workflow.
I'll give an example of the most recent situation. (Win 7 PC's and a Win 2012 server) Approx. 30 PC's numbered from 1 to potentially anything, mostly within that 1-30 range though.
As it was a complete mess all the computer objects were removed from AD to start fresh.
In many cases I can simply change the name of the PC, restart and it will fine. If that doesn't work going through the Join a Domain or Workgroup wizard works and then finally if they don't work, changing to a workgroup, restart, re-join the domain and restart does it. Occasionally get trust relationship errors and have to re-do the last one.
As you can tell, it's messy, inefficient and potentially wrong in a few ways. I know I'm at risk of sounding vague and there's unlikely to be one single answer but it's time consuming and I'm very interested in improving my methodology and hopefully it will help some people.
Best Answer
I have been in a similarl situation before; The way I did is was using netdom, less clicks, and you can use a batch file or psexec to make life a lot easier/quicker.
e.g.