I saw this post by Craig Andera, which prompted me to write up a few tricks I knew about Remote Desktopping. Now these might be trivial, but still, some might be new and if you know of any other such tricks I'd love to hear back.

1. Create a new text file, call it “My Connection.RDP” (Note it's not .txt), right click -> Edit, and in there you will see a whole bevy of options. A few favorite ones I use regularly are -
   a) Save password, this way I can put many of these in my quicklaunch under a submenu, and simply click'n'connect'n'work.
   b) Change display to 32bit depth (seriously, broadband guys)
   c) Change the Experience settings - check everything BUT wallpaper. Wallpaper is such a drag IMHO on remote desktopping.

2. If you have a laptop, under the “Remote Computer Sound”, change this option to “Leave at remote computer”. That way, I can use my pda/laptop as a remote control to my airtunes connected to my home theater system.

3. As Craig mentioned, local disk drives/printers/serial ports, though believe it or not, I've had a problem with crystal reports and printers. This'll work even in Command Prompt.

4. Remote Desktopping in XP connects you to the same session, whereas in 2003 it forces you to create a new connection, I find that really irritating since I could leave a job running at work that I might want to monitor from home. You can easily get around that my passing in the “/console” commandline parameter to the executable msrtc.exe. So the entire command would look like “%SystemRoot%\system32\mstsc.exe MyConn.RDP /Console”, this would connect you to an existing session if you are already logged in.

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