Rename all computers with a Powershell script

Trent Steenholdt
January 31, 2014

1 minutes to read

It’s an activity that all of us will have done numerous times in the past and will do in the future… rename a computer! But what happens when say the organisation you work for changes their workstation naming standard and want to have all the workstations renamed straight away?! Well, a simple powershell script is your answer!

What you need?

RSAT Tools. In particular the Active Directory powershell module. Aka, “Import-Module ActiveDirectory”
Rights to rename these workstations assuming AD delegation is set up. It doesn’t have to be Domain Admins!
Permission to run the script from the business (Refer below note).

$organizationalunit = "OU=Computers,OU=Staff,DC=contoso,DC=com"
$computers = Get-ADComputer -SearchBase $organizationalunit | where {$_.name -notlike "Contoso-*"}
$num = 0001
 
Foreach($computer in $computers)
{
 For($num=1;$num -lt $computers.count;$num++)
    {
        Rename-Computer -Computername $computer -NewName "Contoso-$num" -Force -Restart
    }
}

This powershell script will search the OU of “OU=Computers,OU=Staff,DC=contoso,DC=com”, get all the AD computers in this OU that doesn’t have the name like “Contoso-*” and will rename them “Contoso-0001” and upwards until all the computers are renamed. It’s easy to change the ‘Get-ADComputer’ cmdlet to get say only Windows XP machines! Just add:

  -Filter {OperatingSystem -Like "*XP*"}

Just to note: This script will restart the remote computers! So do this out-of-hours or when you organisation has approved the change. Removing the -restart switch will cause authenication issues until the workstation is of course, restarted.

Hope this helps renaming all thos computers!