Remote Desktop/Terminal Services Client RDP file settings

If you use Remote Desktop/Terminal Services Client like I do to control Windows servers and desktops in your organization remotely, then you'll want to check out this site that has info on all of the different settings that can be made to an RDP file with a text editor such as Notepad.

The client software uses RDP files to save all of your settings such as resolution, login name, domain and so forth.

Remote Desktop is invaluable to me in my day to day administration of servers as it's built in to all Windows versions after Win 2000, has very good performance vs VNC and PC Anywhere and can now be used to connect to the console session in Windows Server 2003. As Remote Desktop vets are aware, you can run into a lot of problems installing software in a Terminal Services session that isn't the console session.

By the way, in my experiences I have found that you still need to use the Remote Desktop GUI configurator to do some settings such as password and "save password". For those of you who are security conscious, passwords get hashed into a really long string before they are saved into the RDP, so it's not a simple task to find the passwords from RDP files.

Oh and if you have XP or Server 2003, the Remote Desktop Connection client is built in and available by going to Start->All Programs->Accessories->Communications->Remote Desktop Connection. Otherwise you have to download the client from Microsoft (you can click here to get to this download page on their site).

Thanks to John Roller for providing the link on his blog.