Is there a Remote Desktop HOW TO thread?

[jnuts5423]

I would love to be able to do this option. Ive been searchin for someway to control my pc remotely. Ive been told it cant be done with vista home through remote desktop. oddly enough i been on this same path with the vnc viewer for awhile. but The phone never connects. Ive done The same thing as above, except when i put 2 colons in, i get "authentication scheme unknown". but if i use 1, it will say connecting to vnc for about 2 minutes, and finally times out, my connection goes away, and it stalls. If i try and open it back up, it wont launch. Along with my phone is very boggy until i shut it off. Anything im missing? Ive played with the firewall settings, although i dont really know what im doin there, but i cant get it to work for nothin. same thing everytime.

[jbkassi]

Originally Posted by sjs01

I'm assuming you are wanting to be able to connect to your computer over the internet, and not just WIFI. If I'm correct, what you must do is forward some ports.

First you will want to make sure remote desktop is ready to be used on your computer, I also use XP so I will try to give a step by step instruction.

1. Click on the Start Menu then right click on "My computer" and go to the "Remote" Tab. Make sure both "Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer" and "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer" are checked. Then click apply and and ok.

2. Now you are going to want to find the local IP Address of your computer, to do this go into the start menu and click "Run" then type "cmd.exe" (without the quotes) and hit enter. Then type "Ipconfig" (again without the quotes) into the cmd command line, and there should be a few things that come up look for something that says "IP Address . . . . . xx.x.x.x".

3. Now you are going to have to forward ports on your router, I am assuming you know how to forward ports on your router (If you don't this link should help). You are going to want to forward port 3389 to your IP Address found in step two.

4. You need to find the IP Address of your router you can do this by going to a site like: this.

5. Now you are going to go on your phone and start the Remote Desktop application. In the "Computer" box you will type in the IP Adress found in step 4, in the "User Name" box you type in the user name you want to log in as, and in the "Password" box you will type in the password of the user name.

If you have any questions about this let me know and I will try to help.

Edit:
If you want to connect to your computer over WiFi, just skip step 4 but do all the rest, and for step 5 instead of typing the IP Address found in step 4 you will use the IP Address found in step 2.

Be careful guys,
Everyone knows that port 3389 is open by default when RDP is activate, and by doing so you are opening yourselves to a security risk. You need to change port 3389 to another port of your choice that only you would know. Once done, let's say that your IP address is 68.234.34.4 and you have open port 65005, on the Remote Client you would type 68.234.34.4:65005. If port 3389 is in used you don't need to write 68.234.34.4:3389 because windows and any client would know to use port 3389 by default. Sorry to be a little long explaining this, but people can easily open their privacy to the WWW.
Let me know if you want to know the procedure to change the port number.

[jbkassi]

Oops forgot to mention that you want to use a Static IP address. If DHCP is used to assign IP Creditentials, after rebooting your PC the IP address of your computer may change and the port will no longer be fowarded from your router to your PC.

[jnuts5423]

got it going. Sweet!

[sjs01]

Originally Posted by jbkassi

Be careful guys,
Everyone knows that port 3389 is open by default when RDP is activate, and by doing so you are opening yourselves to a security risk. You need to change port 3389 to another port of your choice that only you would know. Once done, let's say that your IP address is 68.234.34.4 and you have open port 65005, on the Remote Client you would type 68.234.34.4:65005. If port 3389 is in used you don't need to write 68.234.34.4:3389 because windows and any client would know to use port 3389 by default. Sorry to be a little long explaining this, but people can easily open their privacy to the WWW.
Let me know if you want to know the procedure to change the port number.

Oh yes, thank you for pointing that out. I just tried to go through the step by step instructions for setting up remote desktop. If you would like the set up to be more secure, or in my case, if you would like to be able to have more than one computer set up for remote desktop you can change the listening port on your computer. For windows XP you can follow the link here it shows the simple steps to change the listening port. Be careful as you will be modifying your registry. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe I read somewhere that the ports above 50001 aren't in use by windows, and can be used. You have to remember, because you changed the listening port in your registry, you must also forward to that port on your router, and allow that port through you firewall.

If anyone has any questions about this I can try to help as best as I know how.

[jefferyallen]

Thank you sjs01, that is a really great set of instructions. I have been trying to figure out how to do this for a bit. Your post got me through it. Thanks!

It seems likely others already knew this, but I could not get Netflix to work this way.

[NinjaDuck]

Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (Windows Mobile; WCE; Opera Mobi/WMD-50433; U; en) Presto/2.4.13 Version/10.00)

just a word of warning...

Publishing RDP (remote desktop) out to the public network is a risky thing to do without a VPN.