Effing the Ineffable

Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection application is useful in a lot of scenarios, be it administering a large number of servers or connecting to your workstation when you’re out on the road. I use it regularly both at work and at home.

Before Remote Desktop became widely available, VNC was the de-facto standard for remotely administrating a machine over the network. One of the big advantages to VNC is that it’s multi-platform, allowing you to administer a Linux machine from a Windows box, and so on. However, when using VNC between Windows machines, it always seemed slow to respond compared to Remote Desktop, hence why myself and many others prefer using it when connecting between Windows-based machine.

Despite that, VNC had one major advantage for me - the ability to scale the remote desktop screen. In other words, you could make the remote session take up less space on your local desktop, by scaling down the pixels. You don’t get all the detail, but you get enough to check up on the progress of an installation, or see if you have any new e-mail. I was under the impression that the Remote Desktop client didn’t have this capability - until now.

The problem was exacebated when I got a new monitor for my work desktop. The new screen has a resolution of 1680×1050, whereas my laptop only has a resolution of 1400×1050. By default, when you connect to a remote machine, the machine’s resolution is changed to match that of the local computer - this meant that whenever I remotely connected to my work desktop, it would resize the screen to 1400×1050, losing my window and icon positioning - very annoying.

This was relatively easy to fix by telling the client to use the remote machine’s resolution, but left me needing to scroll the remote desktop window on my laptop to be able to access everything. Very slow, very annoying.

However, a search on the ‘net revealed that Microsoft actually had implemented display scaling into the remote desktop client - as a hidden feature! I found a blog post detailing a setting that allows the desktop to be scaled down to fit. And it’s really easy to use. All you need to do is save your remote desktop connection profile. When you start Remote Desktop Connection, after you have entered the address simply click the ‘options’ button, and choose ’save as…’. This creates an RDP file which you can use to launch the connection.

Then, all you have to do is open this RDF file in your favourite text editor (Notepad will do), and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

smart sizing:i:1

And that’s it! When you double-click on the RDP file and connect to the remote machine, you’ll be able to resize the remote desktop window to whatever size you want, whilst still being able to see all of the remote desktop!

A simple thing, but it makes my life that little bit easier!

Useful links:
Remote Desktop Connection 6 - this is a (free) upgrade to the version shipped with Vista. Not required for desktop scaling, but does allow remote desktop resolutions higher than 1600×1200.

Filed under: Useful Tips on April 15th, 2007