Windows Configuration Designer avoiding renaming workstations

hi yevhen, welcome in community

No, you cannot technically leave the “Device name” field completely blank in WCD’s “Provision desktop devices” wizard, because the UI marks it as required. However — there are ways to effectively skip or neutralize the rename step, depending on how you’re building your provisioning package.

You can have two options:

Option 1: Use a neutral name expression

If you don’t want to rename each workstation manually, use a device name pattern variable so each system generates its own unique name, e.g.:

%SERIAL%

or

PC-%RAND:4%

This way, Windows automatically inserts the hardware serial number or a random 4-digit suffix. It doesn’t “skip” renaming but avoids conflicts and manual input.

Option 2: Use the advanced provisioning mode

If you’re building your package not through the “wizard” but via the “Advanced provisioning” editor, you can simply omit the “DeviceName” setting from the configuration tree.

Steps:

Open Windows Configuration Designer.

Instead of “Provision desktop devices,” choose Advanced provisioning.

Expand:

Runtime settings > ComputerName

Simply don’t define a value for ComputerName.

When that setting is missing, the provisioning package won’t attempt to rename the device, and Windows Setup will keep the existing machine name (typically something like DESKTOP-XXXXXXX).

Let me know

Elvis