I have personal laptop for home use only, but now I need to use my laptop at office.
In order to use the laptop at the office I need to add my laptop to domain.
How do I do this?
Joining laptop to Active Directory domain
active-directory
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This has been a fun topic of discussion on Server Fault. There appear to be varying "religious views" on the topic.
I agree with Microsoft's recommendation: Use a sub-domain of the company's already-registered Internet domain name.
So, if you own foo.com, use ad.foo.com or some such.
The most vile thing, as I see it, is using the registered Internet domain name, verbatim, for the Active Directory domain name. This causes you to be forced to manually copy records from the Internet DNS (like www) into the Active Directory DNS zone to allow "external" names to resolve. I've seen utterly silly things like IIS installed on every DC in an organization running a web site that does a redirect such that someone entering foo.com into their browser would be redirected to www.foo.com by these IIS installations. Utter silliness!
Using the Internet domain name gains you no advantages, but creates "make work" every time you change the IP addresses that external host names refer to. (Try using geographically load-balanced DNS for the external hosts and integrating that with such a "split DNS" situation, too! Gee-- that would be fun...)
Using such a subdomain has no effect on things like Exchange email delivery or User Principal Name (UPN) suffixes, BTW. (I often see those both cited as excuses for using the Internet domain name as the AD domain name.)
I also see the excuse "lots of big companies do it". Large companies can make boneheaded decisions as easily (if not moreso) than small companies. I don't buy that just because a large company makes a bad decision that somehow causes it to be a good decision.
There are 2 ways to do this depending on how comfortable you are.
1) User Windows Easy Transfer under Programs -> System Tools.
This method is very easy,
Login as Local user and use the Easy Transfer program to create an Easy Transfer File
Put the machine on the domain.
Login as Domain user and run the Easy Transfer program to unpack the file
The problem with this method is it involves a copy and depending on how much data they have that can take a while. So what's the fastest way to do it?
2) Move the files from the local user profile to the domain user profile.
Using a move operation in Windows 7 as opposed to a copy is much faster if you are moving between locations on the same hard disk.
The first time you log in with a user a profile is created for them under C:\Users The profile for each user is simply a folder in this directory with their username. If you are using the same user names the new folder will be called "username"."yourdomain". So all you have to do is move all the important files from the old profile to the new profile. Now technically you could just do a select all and move literally all the files from one profile to the other, but I would not suggest it as there are system files that can make things a bit wonky if they don't move correctly.
Most of the good stuff will be in the folders Documents, Favorites (assuming you run IE), Pictures, Video, Music and AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook (Appdata is hidden by default) if you have outlook with .PSTs
Best Answer
Almost certainly you can't personally add it, you need to be at least a Domain Admin to join a computer to a domain - contact your IT team.
Secondly your PC must be running a 'Pro' version of Windows (XP Pro, Vista or W7 Business/Enterprise/Premium).
Finally you might consider that you might not actually want your laptop joined to a domain it might add various restrictions to your computer - fine for a work computer but annoying for a personal PC.
As a footnote - I find it almost unthinkable to add a personal computer to a company domain - not your battle I know.