Tuesday, October 03, 2006

In continuing with numerous requests for Terminal Services / Remote Desktop tips;

This week's tip: How to enable Remote Desktop on a remote PC.

If you've ever managed a Microsoft Windows based network, I'm going to guess you've had a situation where you needed to connect to a remote PC on a network which you have access to, but for one reason or another you never enabled Remote Desktop. If you have access to the machine in question (From within the local network, you must have access to conduct RPC to the PC) you can enable Remote Desktop using Remote Registry.

  1. Start > Run> Type 'Regedit'
  2. Browse or type in the name of the computer


    (Remember this has to be a computer you can browse to by UNC i.e. \\computername\)
  3. Once connected, Browse to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server


  4. Set fDenyTSConnection to 0
  5. Close Regedit, within a few seconds the PC should start responding to Remote Desktop Clients

P.S.: It's a good thing to check the value TSEnabled, under this same key, and insure that this is set to 1