How To Setup Remote Desktop

Now, remote desktop is a Microsoft tool that essentially lets you connect to another computer across a network and it's as if the computer you're connecting to was actually right in front of you like a remote control. Now, this can be really useful if a friend of yours is having a problem with their computer and they want you to take a look at it. Rather than you going across to their computer or across to their town or city or whatever, you can have their computer desktop in front of you as though you were actually sitting at their desk.

Now, this is particularly useful as well in large organizations where they've got hundreds of computers on the machine room floor and rather than having to go to the machine room and standing in front of the computers, you can access all of their servers from your desktop. So let's show you how to set this up on Windows Vista and the process is very similar for Windows XP and Windows 7. So if you click on the start menu and on the right hand side here, you'll see the computer option, right click on that and then click on properties.

Now, on the top right hand side here, you'll see there is an entry called remote settings, so click on that and it brings up the system properties pane and the right hand tab here is called "remote". Now, there are a few things we want to have a look at. "Remote assistance" is another kind of remote desktop; this is already checked on this computer but in the bottom half of the window, we see the remote desktop settings now at the moment it says "don't allow connections to this computer" and this is the default on most Windows systems.

However, we do want to have remote desktop so we're going to click on one of these two options here. The first one is "allow connections from computers running any version of remote desktop" and as it says, it's actually less secure and then at the bottom, it says "allow computers to connect that are running with a network level authentication" and that's a little bit more secure. Now, I'm going to click on allow computers running any version of remote desktop here and I'm going to click on "ok".

Now, the thing is not to worry because people still need a username and password to be able to log onto your computer. Usually, that's the username and password that you will have provided them. One last thing, let's just show you how to connect to another computer so again if we go to the start menu and this time at the bottom, just because I'm a bit lazy, I'm going to type in remote desktop and as if by magic, remote desktop connection appears at the top.

We click on that and here we go, the remote desktop window and the most important thing you need to type in here is the name of the computer that you're going to be connecting to, that might be an IP address that the person that you're connecting to gives to you or it might be the name of a computer if it's on your local network. So, there you go, it's as simple as that. That's how to set up a remote desktop connection. .