We have shown you how to setup a Remote desktop connection, so you can connect to a remote computer to do your work or to troubleshoot your friend’s computer. However, it is utterly useless if it takes forever to connect to the remote machine. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to speed up this process.
Optimizing the Remote Desktop Connection
Run Remote Desktop by right-clicking the bottom-left corner of the screen and selecting “Run.”
Type “mstsc” in the text field and click “OK.” This opens the Remote Desktop application.
On the Remote Desktop application, click “Show Options.”
Pay attention to these two tabs: Display and Experience.
Click the “Display” tab. Under the “Display Configuration” section, moving the slider to the left to decrease the size of the screen when you connect to the host. The lower the screen size, the faster Remote Desktop will be.
Under the “Colors” section, click the drop-down menu to change the quality. The lower the quality, the faster the connection will be.
Click the “Experience” tab. Under the “Performance” section, click the drop-down menu to change the connection speed. A lower connection speed will speed up the Remote Desktop connection. For the best performance, choose “Modem” (56 kbps) as it will disable resource-hungry features such as font smoothing and window animations.
Will This Really Speed Up Performance?
To understand how this is possible, take a moment to consider the settings that you are modifying. The changes shown above mostly have to do with graphics and animations of the host computer, which are often resource intensive. By reducing the color depth, changing the screen size, and simplifying animations substantially decreases the amount of network resources used during the remote desktop connection, and thus improve its performance.