Turn On or Enable Remote Desktop on Windows Vista

Remote Desktop is a Windows service that allowed you to remote access or remote control the system from another computer. Useful when you want to connect to your home PC from office, or an IT administrator wants to manage remote computer, remote Desktop has been incorporated or built into modern Windows operating system, including Windows Vista, although Remote Desktop Server service is not enabled by default. To let a Windows Vista system to accept incoming Remote Desktop connection, we need to turn on or enable Remote Desktop.

There are three ways to turn on and enable Remote Desktop service in Windows Vista:

Enable Remote Desktop via Windows Vista Graphical User Interface (GUI)

1. Click on Start button, then open Control Panel to select the System applet. Alternatively, right click on Computer icon and select Properties on right click contextual menu.
2. Click on the Remote Settings link in the left-hand task pane.

   

3. You will see System Properties window with Remote tab selected.

   

4. Select the radio button of either “Allow connections from computer running any version of Remote Desktop (less secure)” or “Allow connections only from computer running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (more secure)”. If you’re using a Windows Vista RD clients to initiate the Remote Desktop session, you can safely select the later option. If you’re using non-Vista OS such as Win XP or Win2K, not sure or not understand, select the first option. See below note for more details.
5. Next, click on the Select Users button. You need to choose all non-administrative users that you intend to grant remote logon rights for them to remotely access or control this computer.
6. In the Select Users dialog, click on the Add button.
7. Type the name of the user you want to grant Remote Desktop access rights to, and then click OK.
8. Repeat above 2 steps to add more users.
9. Click on OK twice to save the settings.

Turn on Windows Vista Remote Desktop via Group Policy

To enable the Remote Desktop functionality, navigate to the following location in local computer policy or domain group policy (network wide effect to apply across the entire Active Directory network, and Windows Vista machine is needed in order to process the template files):

Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Terminal Services \ Terminal Server \ Connections

At the location, find the policy named Allow users to connect remotely using Terminal Services, and set it to Enable.

To require the use of RDP version 6 and NLA, browse to the following location in local computer policy or domain group policy (restrictions and functions same as above):

Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Terminal Services \ Terminal Server \ Security

In the folder, search for Require user authentication using RDP 6.0 for remote connections, and set it to Enable.

To control which users have access to the Vista system via Remote Desktop, you can add the authorized users to Remote Desktop Users group on the local machine, while those denied access should be removed from the list.

Enable Remote Desktop on Windows Vista via the registry

1. Open registry editor.
2. Navigate or browse to the following key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Terminal Server

3. Locate the fDenyTSConnections subkey, and change the DWORD value to 0.
4. To enforce the use of RDP 6.0 and NLA, navigate to the following key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp

5. Locate the UserAuthentication subkey, and change the DWORD value to 1.
6. Exit registry editor and restart the computer to make the changes effective.

Once you have enabled or turned on Remote Desktop, Windows Vista will automatically open the required and necessary ports in Windows Firewall to listen and accept any incoming Remote Desktop connections.

Note: Network Level Authentication (NLA) is a new protocol in Remote Desktop to provide more secure connections where NLA will authenticate the user prior to a full remote desktop connection being established. With this feature, Remote Desktop uses fewer resources on the remote machine during the initial handshake state, and helps to prevent RDP-related denial of service attacks. NLA is built into the Windows Vista Remote Desktop client which is version 6 of the terminal services client. Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) can be downloaded and installed on Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP SP2 machines.

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