Old Laptops are shown on the computer list

Mahir,

What "Delete Mode" are you using under your Active Directory preferences?

Those old laptops are probably reading as online because new computers are using the same IP addresses as those old computers. Since the IP addresses are still pingable, they are showing as online.

Thank you, Luke, for your reply. 

After your message, I have tried all three "Delete Mode". But it didn't help me. Still seeing old laptops with Current user names and also online. 

Mahir,

Are you certain that the computer accounts for these old laptops are not still present in Active Directory?

I recommend that you use Mixed Sync as the delete mode.

You should also probably turn on auto sync. I have my frequency for auto sync set to 1 hour, but you can set it to whatever is appropriate for you. You can also click "Sync Now" to manually trigger an AD sync.

I see that you have the checkbox for "Sync Disabled Computers" checked. You might want to uncheck that to see if it fixes your problem.

I'm still using for the new users some of those computers, but I have cleaned up very old ones. So those computers are still in active directory. The issue is that, when I sync, the computers' owners still seem to be the old users. 

I set Active Directory Sync Preferences as you recommended. 

Mahir,

The "Current User" field is not a reliable indicator of who owns the computer-- it just reflects who was currently logged into that computer on its last scan date. If these old computers haven't been re-scanned since the previous "Current User" was signed in, it will not update.

Thanks again for your reply. 

I suppose these old computers IP address is the same as some of the new ones, that is why it is showing the same "Current User".

Could you give me any advice to follow up on who is using which computer? What is the best way?

Mahir,

There could be a problem with your DNS causing the old computers to have incorrect "Current User" info. Do you have dynamic DNS in place? DNS issues could easily cause PDQ Inventory to have difficulty in uniquely identifying comptuers.

If you need to find who is currently logged into a specific computer, you can easily achieve that with PowerShell (just replace "COMPUTERNAME" with the name of the computer that you want to query):

Get-CimInstance –ComputerName COMPUTERNAME –ClassName Win32_ComputerSystem | Select-Object UserName

However, if you want a way to correctly populate all of this data directly in PDQ, I don't think there is a way to do that.

Just to clarify-- do you want a reliable record of which users are currently signed into which computers?  The "Current User" field in PDQ does this.

Or do you want a reliable record of which users "own" which computers? You are going to need to do some manual data entry to populate that data. You could add a custom field for computer owner in PDQ and populate it that way. PDQ does not have a way to magically determine which users own which computers, that is data that can only come from your organization's records.

If your environment works in such a way that users and computers always have a one-to-one relationship and no user ever moves to a different computer, I suppose you could treat the "Current User" field as an "owner" field, but that breaks down when you have something like an IT staff member logging into someone's computer for maintenance.