WebGyver Revisited

Configuring Remote Desktop

Posted by admin on March 6, 2009

Lately, I’ve been using the Windows utility Remote Desktop (RD) a lot to work on various servers. One annoying thing I’ve noticed, as I moved from one computer to another and did remote work from various locations, was that the resolution and a few other settings seemed to vary. However, there’s a fix for that.

Although it never occurred to me to mess with this, I clicked Options and found a wealth of configuration settings. Best of all, I could even make this thing remember my preferred settings, save those settings to my USB stick and enjoy the rest of my life.

So click Options and let’s take a look under the hood:

For each remote connection, you can enter your user name and password — and RD will remember it, as long as you a) check the “Save my password” box and b) save the custom connection settings as a .rdp file (Save As…).

The thing that was of most interest to me were the Display settings. Holy Batman, that’s where you set up the remoted desktop size and the color depth. I was beginning to think those settings were immovable.

Now how cool is that? Finally, I also customized the Local Resources settings and removed all check marks for the Disk drives, Printers and Serial ports. If you need any of those connections, by all means, leave them checked. In my case, this was an easy way to prevent “siletn” system errors from occurring on one of the servers (especially since it tried to connect to non-existing printers).

That wasn’t so bad, right? And as I said, if you save the .rdp file with your custom connection settings, you only need to do this once.

For more information:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457106.aspx

Keywords: Remote Desktop, RDA, configuration, settings, connection, screen resolution, display, color depth, printers, serial ports, disk drives