Why is my Remote Desktop slow?

How to optimize your slow Remote Desktop connection?

1. Start-up Remote Desktop Connection in your computer from Start -> All Programs -> Accessories->Remote Desktop Connection (or click on the start-button, select “Run” and type “mstsc” in the box and click on “OK”)

2. Click on the Options button and then click on the Experience Tab

3. Under “Choose your connection speed to Optimize performance” select a lower speed like “Modem -56kbps” or ” Broadband – 128kbps – 1.5mbps.”

(Note: As you increase or decrease the connection speed, Windows XP automatically allows or removes additional options, under “Allow the following” in the same window.)

You can also do one more thing to speed up your Remote Desktop connection:

1. Click on the Local Resources Tab of the Remote Desktop Connection window.
2. Under “Remote Computer Sound“, select “Do not play”
3. Then, under Local Devices, select only those devices you would need, such as Disk Drives, Printers or Serial ports.

See image below:

4. Click on Connect.

You will now see an improvement in the speed of your Remote Desktop Connection!

Remote Desktop is great thing when it works but with Windows 10 I usually see one problem after another. I decided to write up some tricks I need pretty often when RDP is going crazy on some Windows 10 box. Nothing special but I hope I save some people hours of time on trying out different tricks found in internet.

Full screen RDP shows local taskbar in foreground

This is one of the most annoying bugs. RDP is opened full screen but what local taskbar is shown instead of remote machine one. It’s possible to see remote machine taskbar only if RDP window is not maximized. Solution is simple – we need to restart Windows Explorer.

1. Open Task Manager on local machine
2. Find WIndows Explorer from processes list
3. Right-click on it
4. Select Restart
5. Connect to remote machine again

RDP connection to remote machine is very slow

Another show-stopper is slow connection to Windows 10 machines over RDP. It doesn’t seem to happen with all machines but there are always some with issue. It doesn’t matter if connection is made from local network or over internet – when’ it’s slow, it’s just slow. Based on John D’s Tech Site article Remote Desktop slow problem solved it’s an old bug haunting around in Windows from version to version since Windows Vista.

For me it worked when I ran the command on both Windows 10 machines.

1. Open command prompt in administrative permissions
2. Run the following command: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=highlyrestricted
3. Close command prompt

For me things worked out without restarting machines. The effect was immediate.

Connecting from high-resolution to low-resolution machines

Modern laptops come with damn good displays and it can be problematic to use remote machine with lower screen resolution. Everything is very small and sometimes it’s almost impossible to read the screen. There is RDP client available at Windows Store and usually end users are okay with it. Tech crowd needs different solution usually.

1. Open Windows Explorer and move to c:\windows\system32\
2. Check if there is file called mstsc.exe.manifest and if file doesn’t exist create it
3. Paste the following XML to this file: <asmv3:application>
     <asmv3:windowsSettings xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">
       <ms_windowsSettings:dpiAware xmlns:ms_windowsSettings="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">false</ms_windowsSettings:dpiAware>
     </asmv3:windowsSettings>
   </asmv3:application>
4. Save file and connect to some remote server again.

It doesn’t work for all applications on remote servers but most of applications I need there are well usable after this little hack.

Solution for poor WiFi adapters

I have come machines connected to network over WiFi as cables doesn’t reach these machines. Interesting thing is that also WiFi adapters can be problem although when sitting at machines we don’t notice anything. I have some machines connected to network over WiFi as there is no cabling to rooms where the machines are located. So, it’s straight connection over WiFi like shown on image below.

With some of these machines I had issues also after applying fixes described above. Not always but sometimes RDP connections got slow and then dropped. Few times I was not able to connect to those machines until I restarted RDP service. Sometimes WiFi connection went down and adapter started work again when I restarted machine.

These issues made me think about possibility of low quality WiFi adapters in machines. Okay, one machine has also expensive one but still ran into adapter issues. Working solution was short in the dark – I just thought maybe it works as routers have usually more stable hardware due to different network work loads. I connected problematic machines to my old WRT-54G with cables. Then I configured old router as wireless client bridge that connects to main router over WiFi. Viola! My problems got solved.

Network slow-down! Router-to-router wireless connection doesn’t come for free. Connection speed drops twice. Before client bridge I had 40 Mbps connection between machines and main router. After setting up client bridge connection speed went down to 20 Mbps.

Use client bridge and other router-to-router wireless solution only when anything else doesn’t work.

• It is probably your provider. The internet, in general, is getting crushed right now. TWC/Spectrum is just horrible in my area right now. Latency is about 15 times normal even on my DIA connections. 

• I was hoping this wasn't the reason, but you may be right...

• Adjusting the quality settings will help with the bandwidth used by the connection but not really the latency, which is more important on an RDP connection. 

  Can you test the latency between your connection and the where your VPN terminates? I would do a few traceroutes and see where the latency is coming from. If it is on the internet there is likely little anyone will do for you on the ISP side. At least you will know it is from the Internet and not something in your equipment that way. 

  Conversely, if the path between you and the termination point of the VPN is fine, you may start looking at something internal. Whether it be an overloaded VPN concentrator or home router or bad wifi signal etc. 

• All networks are being hammered even the cloud and streaming companies are affected.

  If you are on fiber or have less people on VPN then you are somewhat faster but bottlenecks will be a problem for the next 30 days...

  Happy computing from home!

• Can I test the latency just by pinging the remote computer?

• spicehead-r261t wrote:Can I test the latency just by pinging the remote computer?Yes but what Justin is saying is that you may gain insight as to the source of your latency. On your local computer do tracert to your vpn address. You could likely even tracert the remote machine itself but it’s tricky if the remote subnet uses the same private addresses . From your Remote Desktop, do a tracert to your home’s public IP address (you can ask Google “what’s my ip”)Do this a few times to get a sense of which hop may be the problem.

  If the lag is out in the big blue internet there is little else you can do.

• Alright I'll try that. Thanks all!

• spicehead-r261t wrote:

  - The latency is not limited to the program either; even opening the start menu takes 10 s or more.

  I have changed various RDT settings like the display color depth and the connection speed (currently set to modem 56 kbps) and have turned off persistent bit cacheing. It's now better than it was yesterday, when I was losing connection every few minutes, but it's still FAR slower than it has been.
  

  
  

  The answer may lies on the remote Workstation.....is the remote machine capable of running your GPU intensive applications on top of RDP ?

  What is the resource consumption when the lags happen ? Every tried rebooting the remote machine ?

  Instead of using RDP, ever considered PCoIP or remote managers like Teamviewer or splashtop etc to see if the issue persist ?

  
  Spice (1) flagReport
  Was this post helpful? thumb_up thumb_down

• adrian_ych wrote:

  The answer may lies on the remote Workstation.....is the remote machine capable of running your GPU intensive applications on top of RDP ?

  What is the resource consumption when the lags happen ? Every tried rebooting the remote machine ?

  Instead of using RDP, ever considered PCoIP or remote managers like Teamviewer or splashtop etc to see if the issue persist ?

  Thanks for highlighting Splashtop.  Splashtop Business Access is a high performance remote access solution and fully optimized to support NVIDIA/AMD/Intel GPU and chipset.  As Splashtop comes with 2FA, device authen and TLS/SSL encryption, there is actually no need to have VPN which tends to be a bottleneck as well.  VPNs are known to add sizable overhead and difficult to scale.... and they need to be regularly patched to prevent hacker attacks.  Please give Splashtop a free test drive. I'm here to answer any question.