Add Remote Desktop Access to Windows Vista Home Editions

Posted on February 13th, 2007 by Jason

The Remote Desktop Connection feature in Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions enables easier remote access to any resource or application that your organization has made available to you. As you can see the Home editions are missing the feature which could pose a problem for some users of those editions.

We have to rely on third party products to add Remote Desktop functionality to Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium. The software that we are going to use is called TightVNC. It takes up about two megabytes of disk space on your system and requires some basic configuration to work.
The current user properties can be edited during the installation of the program. You should supply a secure password, set a port or port range that should be used and edit the other options that are visible in the configuration menu. I would advise to remove the option to disable remote keyboard and pointer (view-mode only).

Congratulations you have added remote desktop support to Windows Vista Home Basic and Premium.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Responses to “Add Remote Desktop Access to Windows Vista Home Editions”

  1. James on 22 Feb 2008 at 8:52 pm #

    Yeah, but even at its best, VNC sucks compared to remote desktop. This is for a technical reason (GDI acceleration) that the VNC folks seem to completely ignore. They could make it faster, but they don’t. For this, they fail.

  2. Macca on 16 Apr 2008 at 11:53 am #

    Post sp1 / No dll hacks.
    I was frustrated too that I could not remote from my laptop with vista premiun to my desktop with ultimate. I could remote the other way of course.
    Last night I forwarded udp and tcp ports 3389 on my router using the desktops address and was able to remote to my desktop from my laptop using the free rdc download from microsoft.
    Hope this helps someone else.

  3. Also a James on 10 Sep 2009 at 12:28 pm #

    VNC is indeed slow, but at FREE, it beats the heck out of “nothing at all”, which is what M$ leaves you with unless you pay more for their “higher end” versions.
    For this, and the fact that VNC will run on virtually any OS (Win, Linux, OSX, BSD, etc.), I would at least give it a B+.
    Yeah, it’s a shame it doesn’t have some form of built-in encryption (tunnel it through SSH if you care), or isn’t a lot faster, but how many free programs of this caliber have you released or helped develop with no pay? (I haven’t any).

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