See network computer description in Explorer

When viewing the list of network computers in Windows Explorer on a Win 7 machine there appears to be no way of readily seeing the description field, which makes that pretty well useless. I believe this problem started with Vista but I'm seeing it for the first time because I was fortunate enough to skip over Vista.

We're currently rolling out Win 7 on new boxes and although I'm changing the naming system to something more sensible, the old boxes have names such as FWS01, FWS02, etc. Managing a network of computers with such names is made more difficult when you can't readily see who's machine each one is.

Googling the problem brought up a workaround involving creating a shortcut on an XP machine and copying that to the Win 7 box but that's a long way from ideal. Is there some kind of hack that can be applied to machines, the operator of which needs to be able to see the description field?

Just realized you already had the XP shortcut piece.

You could make a new shortcut as well using the folder/guid technique, e. g. making a folder on the desktop named "Network.{208d2c60-3aea-1069-a2d7-08002b30309d}". That would be the equivalent of the Windows Network shortcut. It might be possible to make that say in a login script or something - not much better than copying a shortcut from XP I guess but it's another option.

I don't have a Win7 machine handy, but is there anything available in the View menu? Such as View Columns or show columns?

Do you get more info in, say Details view than Icon View?

(Note to self: get a Win7 Machine...)

Have you tried opening My Network Places on a XP machine and expand Entire Network and MS Windows Network. Then drag your Domain to your desktop creating a shortcut. Finally copy that shortcut to your Vista box, double click and see if the description displays in details view.

Process described here: http://blog.chrisara.com.au/2009/08/restoring-computer-description-in.html

Create a new folder on your desktop and name it this:

Network.{208d2c60-3aea-1069-a2d7-08002b30309d}

That will give you an explorer interface with a "Comments" column that should help.