Using the Remote Desktop Feature of Windows
How to Connect to Your PC on the Go
Introduction
How many times have you been on the road and needed to access your PC at home or work? Maybe you’ve thought about signing up for one of these online services such as GoToMyPC that allows you to access your PC for a monthly fee. Or maybe you are just tired of carrying files back and forth to work or from PC to PC and are looking for a better way.
Good news. There is a better way, and it is free.
Beginning with Windows XP Professional Microsoft has included the tools needed to access your PC from just about anywhere. Through the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) you can access your PC at home or the office anywhere in the world and see the exact same desktop screen as if you were sitting down in front of it. You can even hear audio if you choose, plus connect up your local printers to your remote machine and print as if your printer was hooked directly up to the remote PC.
In this tutorial we’ll walk you through how to setup your PC for remote access, how to connect to a remote desktop session, the tips and tricks for making the most out of the remote desktop features and walk you through how to make sure your security is setup to prevent unauthorized users from connecting in.
We’ll even talk about how to setup your Internet connection to have its own domain name to simplify the process, plus how to test it all out to make sure it is ready to go when you are!
Setting Up Your PC for Remote Connections
During this tutorial we will focus on using Windows XP. However, pay attention to the sidebars which will give you tips and tricks for those of you using Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista.
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Windows XP Professional, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista all have the Remote Desktop Protocol (the software you need to connect via remote desktop) installed. On Windows 2000 Server this is an optional install.
On Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Home Edition it is not available. You can use these operating systems to connect to a remote desktop, but you cannot connect to them.
Setting Up Your PC to Allow Connections
The first thing you must do is allow your PC to receive remote desktop requests and allow you to connect. By default in Windows XP this is turned off for security reasons. We’ll go through some security precautions later on. For now, let’s find out how you can enable this to allow remote connections.
First, we’ll access the Properties page of My Computer.
To do this, right mouse click once on My Computer and select Properties.
Remember, you can access My Computer from either your Start Menu or from your desktop.
You should now have a window like this on your computer.
Let’s take a minute to go over all the options available in this Window.
The first half of the Window is for sending Remote Assistance invitations to friends or others to help you with a problem by sharing out your desktop with them. While this is similar to Remote Desktop, there are differences. We won’t cover this topic in this tutorial, so for now don’t worry about the checkbox.
We are interested in the second half of the screen, Remote Desktop. In this panel you will turn on and off Remote Desktop, plus select who should have access to connect.
You can also click on the “What is Remote Desktop?” link and be directed to the Microsoft Help and Support Center where you can find out more about Remote Desktop and how it works.
For now, let’s go ahead and click on the button labeled “Select Remote Users”
On this screen we can see who already has access to connect to the computer via Remote Desktop as well as add or remove access.
Keep in mind that Administrators always have access to connect even if they are not listed here. Anyone who is a member of the computer group “Administrators” is considered an Administrator. For example, I am logged in as the user Rob. Rob is a member of the Administrators Group and therefore you will see a line of text that says “Rob already has access.”
You will need to add anyone who isn’t part of the Administrators Group if you want them to have access.
Let’s go ahead and click on “Add” and add give some other users permission to connect.
This is by far the trickiest part of setting up Remote Desktop. Windows is asking you for the names of who can connect. The easiest way to accomplish this is to simply click on the “Advanced” button.
You will be presented with another screen. On that screen simply find “Find Now” button and click it.
After you have clicked on the “Find Now” button the screen is populated with all the accounts that are located on the computer.
Accounts that have a red “x” by the name are disabled accounts. These accounts do not have permission to login to the computer either locally or remotely.
The rest of the accounts listed are available accounts you can choose to give permission to login to the machine using Remote Desktop.
To add a user, simply find their name, highlight it, and click on “OK”.
Repeat the above two steps by clicking on “Advanced” and “Find Now” until you have selected all the users you want to be able to connect via Remote Desktop. For our example, we are going to give Dustin and Jan permission to connect. They are not part of the Administrators Group and need explicit permission to connect.
When you finished selecting users you Select Users screen will look similar to the following.
Do you notice the each user has some text and a backslash (“\”) before each of their names? This is the name of your local computer. In our example we named our computer “XP-VMWARE”.
If for some reason you need to remove someone you added by accident, simply click on their name and hit your backspace or delete key.
When you are satisfied that you have everyone you need, click the “OK” key.
You are now taken back to the original screen. Notice how
Dustin and Jan now show up as users who can connect to the computer.
If for some reason you wanted to remove a user in the future, simply click on their name and hit the “Remove” button.
Once you have verified that the users you chose are correct, you can go ahead and click the “OK” button and relax, the hardest part of setting up Remote Desktop is over!
Now that we are back at the Properties page for My Computer make sure that the “Allow users to connect remotely to this computer” box is checked. Once you have verified that click “OK” to apply your changes and exit from this window.
Your computer is now ready to accept remote connections!
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When you checked the “Allow users to connect remotely to this computer” box Windows went ahead and reconfigured its built-in firewall if you have this turned on. It opened up the necessary ports in Windows to allow the communications to take place. If you are running anti-spyware programs they may pop-up to indicate that a change has been made to your system.
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More than likely you are connected to the Internet behind a broadband connection that utilized a cable modem or DSL modem. These modems often have built-in firewalls, or you may be using your own firewall such as a Linksys. In this case you will need to also open the ports on that firewall as well.
By default you will need TCP port 3389 open on your firewall and pointing (routed) to your computer. Because it would be impossible for us to go through every possible cable/DSL modem and firewall to show you how to do this you will need to refer to the instructions that came with your modem or firewall.
If you need more assistance, here are a few websites that might be able to help:
· http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/firewall.mspx
· http://www.portforward.com/default.htm
How Do I Find My Computer?
Now that we have Remote Desktop setup to allow connections we need to understand how we can find our computer to connect to it. Computers access the Internet by using an IP address. Every computer on the Internet has its own, unique IP address. Think of this as like your street address. By knowing what your computer’s IP address is, you can connect to it from anywhere.
In this example we will show you how to find out what your IP address is. Keep in mind that IP addresses are usually dynamic, i.e. they change every so often. It is possible to purchase a fixed IP address from your broadband provider in many cases, but the pricing can be very expensive. See the end of this article where we show you how to setup a NO-IP.com account and be able to use a host name to connect instead of having to remember and keep track of your IP address.
The easiest way to find out what your IP address is to any one of a number of free websites that will display your IP address back to you. The ones that we recommend are as follows:
Simply open up a web browser and enter the URL. Since you will be using this often, especially if your IP address changes, you probably want to bookmark whatever page you use for easy reference.
Once you have your IP address, write it down, we’ll be using it in a few minutes.
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It is possible that you may have two IP addresses! Your computer may have its own private IP address in addition to the IP address given to you by the above methods. If you have a home network or you are behind a DSL or cable modem it is highly likely that your IP address for your computer is different than what the pages above display.
We always want to know your PUBLIC IP Address, which is why the above web pages are the easiest method. Private IP addresses are just that – private - and cannot be accessed outside of your home network.
Connecting Up
Now that you have setup the Remote Desktop service on your PC, found your IP address and configured your firewall you are ready to test it out! Testing it out is best done by enabling the help of a remote friend or using another computer on your home network.
The first thing we need to do is configure the client software to connect. We’ll walk you through the steps needed to configure and connect using the Remote Desktop program included with Windows XP.
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If you are connecting from Windows 95, Windows 98 and 98 Second Edition, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows 2000 you will need to download and install the free client software from Microsoft. You can find this software at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/tools/rdclientdl.mspx.
You will find the connection software in Windows XP under
your Start Menu, Accessories Folder, Communications Folder.
Since you may be using this quite often, you might want to place a shortcut on your desktop.
When you start the software, the first screen you see is
the basic connection screen. You could at this point just enter your IP
address or hostname you wish to connect to and hit “Connect”. However, there
are a number of options you may wish to set. We’ll go over these options and
help you understand what they are used for.
To begin, let’s click Options and expand out our screen to see all the choices available to us.
Now that we have expanded out our options you can see
there are a lot of choices available. On the first screen, the General Tab,
you can specify which computer to login to, a user name, password and domain.
For security reasons, it is highly advised you only enter the computer name.
At the bottom of the screen there are “Save As” and “Open” buttons. You can save your commonly used settings and PC’s that you connect with to your hard drive so that you don’t have to enter the settings every time you want to connect.
For now, let’s enter our IP address we found out earlier in the Computer field and click on the “Display” tab to advance to the next screen.
On the Display screen we can setup how large we want the screen to be and how many colors we want displayed. It is important to remember that the more colors we display, and the larger the screen size, the slower the connection will be. This is normally not an issue with broadband connections, but if you do have a slower connection you may wish to cut down on the number of colors displayed and/or your screen size.
The checkbox at the bottom “Display the connection bar when in full screen mode” will keep a small bar at the top of your screen when connected so you can easily access menu items.
When you are done making settings here, click on the “Local Resources” tab to continue.
On the Local Resources screen you will find a lot of options that affect your experience while connected to the remote system. The first option, Remote computer sound, allows you to choose whether or not you want any sounds played locally at your computer, if you want to leave them at the remote computer or if you want to suppress altogether. Sound takes up a lot of bandwidth, and unless you absolutely need it the recommended setting is “Do not play”.
The Keyboard option controls the Windows shortcut keys (Alt-Tab, etc.). This allows you to set how you want the behavior to be while you are connected. You can choose whether to execute the keystrokes for those special combinations at the local computer, the remote computer or only on the remote computer when in full screen mode.
The last group of options is the most powerful. Here you can choose what printers, disk drives and serial (COMM) ports you want to connect from your LOCAL computer to the REMOTE computer.
For example, I may have a printer here that when I connect up to my PC at work I want to be able to print documents locally. Or I may want to be able to see my local disk drives on the remote computer.
The only recommended option here is for printers, if you need them. The Disk Drives and Serial ports are there if you need them, but because of bandwidth it is recommended you leave them turned off (unchecked).
We are going to skip the Programs tab since that contains only settings that are used very rarely, if at all. The purpose of this tab is to specify a default program that would be run when you connected. For example, you could have it run Microsoft Word when you connected to the remote PC automatically. Normally you will never use any settings under this tab. So for now let’s go ahead and click on the “Experience” tab.
On the Experience tab you will choose what features in terms of themes and other Windows niceties you want access to. Each of these options can use up valuable bandwidth, and most are not necessary.
There is several default profiles built in ranging from Modem connections to LAN. Even if you are on a broadband connection it is recommended that you simply keep the Modem setting. It will provide all the functionality you need while ensuring your session runs as speedy as possible.
Now that we have went through all the tabs we are ready to either go back to the “General” tab or save out this profile to our local PC so we can access it again, or click the “Connect” button and hook up to our remote system.
Let’s go ahead and click “Connect” and see what happens!
Wow! We connected! Congratulations!
We are now connected to our remote system and we are receiving the dialog box to logon. Enter your username and password and you will be taken to the exact same desktop as if you were sitting at the remote computer itself!
If you window looks like the one to the left, click on the “maximize” icon in the upper right hand corner to go into full screen for the best experience.
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My friend connected to my PC and now my screen is locked!
Don’t panic, this is normal with Windows XP. Only one active user can be connected to XP at a time. When you, or a friend, connects to your PC remotely your screen is locked on your end for security purposes.
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Didn’t connect? Receive an error message?
If you didn’t connect or received any error message it may indicate that you did not set something up right. Most likely either your IP address is wrong or your firewall is not configured correctly. Refer to our previous tips about how to find information to setup your firewall and re-verify your IP address.
Disabling Remote Desktop
It is good practice to disable remote desktop on your PC when you will not need it for an extended period of time. Even though you are required to login with a username and password, there are always malicious hackers out there who will try anything to get into your PC. It’s easy to disable Remote Desktop access with just a few keystrokes.
Go back to the properties page for My Computer and click on the “Remote” tab. Simply uncheck the box that says to allow remote users to connect to this computer. Click “OK” and you are done! Windows has turned off the Remote Desktop service and changed the Windows built-in firewall to close the ports locally.
Who Wants to Remember All Those Numbers?
Remembering an IP address is not easy, especially when it changes. There is a free service out there that will keep track of your IP address and allow you to use an easy to remember domain name to access your computer when you are on the go. All that it requires is a small piece of software installed on your local computer so that it can keep track of your IP address for you.
For more information on this, check out their webpage at http://www.no-ip.com/services/managed_dns/free_dynamic_dns.html.
For now, let’s go ahead and get you setup with NO-IP. It’s a painless install and will only take a few minutes.
Using your favorite web browser, go to the link above. You should see a blue button labeled “Sign up now”. Go ahead and click it and let’s enter some details to get our free dynamic domain name.
Note that most information on the account signup form is optional. Fill in as much or as little as you want, accept the terms of service agreement and click “Sign up Now” to continue.
Once you have submitted your information you will receive a confirmation e-mail. You must follow the directions in this email for your account to be successfully created.
Before we get too far, let’s go ahead and download our client software for Windows. This software will help NO-IP keep track of our IP address and update our free domain name with it automatically.
The link to the download for the free software is http://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php?page=win
Download the software and save it to a location on your hard drive. While you are waiting on the software to download, this is a good time to check your email for the confirmation letter from NO-IP. Follow the link included in the e-mail to confirm your account.
Now that we have validated our account, our software
should be downloaded and ready to install. Find the file and double-click it
to begin setup. Please note that for the software to install correctly you
will need to be connected to the Internet.
Follow the prompts on the screens that follow. Most of it is just basic information and licensing.
When finished, the program will launch automatically for you to configure.
The first item you are prompted for is your username and password. Enter these and click “OK” to continue.
You will then be taken to a screen that looks like the one pictured on the left. Since we haven’t defined any hosts yet, the software is telling us it doesn’t know what to update. We can click on the blue “here” link to logon to our account and setup our hosts.
You will be taken to a webpage and automatically logged into your account. You will now see a menu of choices to your left, as well as a blue button saying “Add Host” in the middle of the screen. Go ahead and click the blue button to add a host.
On this screen you will be asked to give your host a unique name. You can call it anything you wish. In our example here, we are calling our host “robsplace” to refer to the fact this is Rob’s computer at his place. You will also need to choose a free domain. Notice you have several choices, again pick one that best suites you and is easy to remember. It does not matter which domain you choose, they all perform the same function-wise.
For our example, we are going to choose the “servebeer.com” name. So our full name will be “robsplace.servebeer.com”. Remember that whatever unique name and domain name you choose to write this down and remember it. From now on this is how you will access your computer remotely with Remote Desktop!
Once you have chosen your unique name and domain you can simply click on the “Create Host” button. You do not need to change any other settings and can leave them at their defaults.
Now that you have finished your host name setup, switch back to the software we just installed. You will notice a line at the bottom of the window that says “Once you have finished your edits, click here to refresh the above list”. Go ahead and click on the blue “here” link now.
You will now notice that the software puts your new domain name in the upper panel. You will also see a icon that represents the status of the domain.
A happy face means that your IP was successfully updated. A sad face means that the IP address is out of date and the software is waiting to update your records for the domain.
You will notice a checkbox next to your domain. Go ahead and check it. This will enable the software to automatically update your domain every time your IP address changes without you having to worry about it.
Congratulations, you have setup your own automatically updating dynamic domain name!
So Let’s Test it all out….
· Launch your remote desktop client software on another computer or have a friend launch it.
· Enter your new domain name
· Click Connect!
You are there! Hooray! No more having to remember a bunch of numbers!