Connection Preferences
These Preferences are the defaults for New Sessions, as well as the settings used for Quick Connect & URL-sourced connections (clicking an rdp:// link somewhere).
Session
- Screen size The screen size to use for this session. If 'Fullscreen', it will automatically be sized to fill your screen.
- Colors Number of colors for the session. More colors makes the session look better but slows connection down. Thousands of colors is usually the optimum balance between quality and speed.
- Connect to console session For Windows 2003 and newer, this allows you to connect to the physical session of the server (equivalent to "mstsc /console" on Windows). This will lock the physical desktop to other users while you use it.
- Hotkey Allows you to set hotkeys for up to 10 servers, using the number keys. This lets you rapidly connect to and switch between heavily used servers.
Devices
- Forward disks Make local files accessible to the remote servers. Don't enable unless you trust the server, as it is a possible security risk.
- Forward printers Make local printers accessible to the remote servers.
Performance
If you are on a above or below average connection, modifying these preferences may give a better experience or speed up the connection.
- Draw desktop background Disables the Windows desktop from being drawn and may speed up slow connections.
- Display window contents while dragging When disabled,an outline will be drawn instead of the entire window while dragging it, and may make window dragging quicker.
- Window and menu animation Minor window and menu effects; the benefits are minimal so only use very fast connections.
- Windows themes Enable or disable Windows themes, which makes a default Windows XP configuration look similar to Windows 2000. Can speed up a slow connections if disabled.
- Font smoothing (ClearType) Enables ClearType, can cause a significant bandwidth increase.