Tag: Remote Desktop

If you are working with or setting up solutions around Remote Desktop Services, do not miss the collection of hotfixes related to RDS at the Microsoft Support web site. The hotfixes are categorized by RDS role and area, for instance RemoteApp, authentication, RD web etc.

RDS Easy Print (previously TS Easy Print) in all its glory but sometimes you may look at problems printing when using the RDS Easy Print driver. Starting with Windows Vista and specifically RDP 6.0 it is possible to connect to remote machines via RDP and automatically get the locally installed printers available in the RDP/TS/RDS session. Previously one had to match the printers drivers with being the exact same on both the local and remote machine. This is done with something called a RDS/TS Easy Print printer driver.

In a few cases I have seen that printing does not work as expected when using the RDS Easy Print printer driver making the printer for example pause, print, pause, print and so on when printing a multiple page document.

The sweet thing here is that with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 comes a new group policy setting that allows us to first try to match the local print driver with a remote (the old fashioned way) before using the RDS Easy Print driver. The setting to activate this is named Use Remote Desktop Easy Print printer driver first and is found in Computer configuration – Administrative templates – Windows Components – Remote Desktop Services – Remote Desktop Session Host – Printer Redirection. Set it to disabled to make use of the “real” print driver first.

Windows 7 already contain RDC version 7.0 but now Microsoft has released the 7.0 client for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Some of the benefits of using the RDC 7.0 connecting from Windows XP or Windows Vista are:

• Windows Media Player Redirection.  This feature lets you play even a HD file on the remote machine without any lag as the video and audio is processed on the local machine.
• True multi monitor support!
• Performance improvements. This is alone a good reason to use the latest RDC 7.0 client.
• Many more new features and improvements, read more at RDS blog.

Note that the above features only work when you connect from Windows XP or Windows Vista with RDC 7.0 to a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 machine.

 Download and more information at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969084

We saw an interesting issue with connecting via Remote Desktop from a Windows client to another machine using Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2. After doing some troubleshooting it turned out to be ESET NOD32 version 4 that caused the extreme slowdown. The work around is to turn off ”HTTPS filtering” in the NOD console.

As Windows 7 RTM is closing in really fast the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services team (formerly Terminal Services team) has announced that there are some last minute changes to the RDP protocol and that some code that was in the Windows 7 pre-RTM build is left out from the RTM code. Specifically this is related to DirectX 10.1 applications and instead of rendering those apps on the client these are in the Windows 7 RTM builds (and Windows Server 2008 R2) rendered on the host.

Other new features in the Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 RDP protocol such as playing high definition videos in Media Player and it being rendered on the client is still there, along with other optimizations and tweaks are still there to provide a significantly better RDP experience than in previous versions of Windows.

Source: RDS blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/06/19/changes-to-remoting-model-in-rdp-7.aspx