I have a laptop with Windows 7 ultimate enterprise edition installed. This is a company laptop so i have domain account as I am a domain user but also a local administrator on my laptop. My problem is that now i am out of the company premises for some days and when i login via my account it takes a hell lot of time to login because it tries to authenticate me on the domain (probably). Can i someway disable this "searching for the domain network" so that i login faster, like a local login account on the laptop does?
SnapOverflow
Your IT department probably doesn't want you logging-on with a local account. As a second-best strategy, I'd recommend you try disabling your wireless NIC and not connecting any wired network cables until after you've logged-on. The total absence of network connectivity should cause the logon process to proceed speedily with cached credentials.
Login to windows when your not connected to any network. That way windows wont be trying to search for an AD server.
Once your logged in, plug-in your cable/turn on your wifi.
We had this problem as well not so long ago. Our fix was to change the DNS settings to match the domain controller (i.e. our AD server). If this works for you, you could have your AD server as your primary DNS and some other public DNS such as OpenDNS as the secondary so that you can still access the internet.
This doesn't sound normal, but I've seen the same behaviour before (albeit on Windows XP).
In our case, it was a logon script that attempting to pipe the output of some commands to a network share. As the logon script was cached, but the network share wasn't available the logon process took far longer than it should have done when not connected to the corporate network.
Try enabling verbose user environment logging and then logging on with the network disconnected, once it does let you in, review the userenv.log file and see what is causing the delay.
Are there any mapped drives or saved locations that point to a network drive? That has caused issues w/ some of my users. Check to see if you have any log on scripts running that would be doing the mapping.