Windows 8 Bible

Using the Remote Desktop App

The Remote Desktop app allows you to control a computer from a remote location. It’s often used to access computers on a corporate network from a home PC or vice versa. It is also very commonly used by system administrators to remotely manage Windows servers. Remote Desktop is different from Remote Assistance in that, with Remote Desktop, you are remotely logging on to a computer and controlling it remotely as a single user. With Remote Assistance, the session includes the local user and the remote expert.

Before you can connect to a remote computer on your office network, a network administrator on the corporate side needs to set up that capability, enabling Remote Desktop connections inbound to the network (or providing a VPN connection to the remote network for the user). Likewise, if you want to connect to your home computer from the office, you need to configure your home firewall to forward port 3389 to the home computer you want to manage. How you configure the firewall depends on the firewall, so we can’t give you specific steps. At this point, we assume that whichever direction you’re going, the necessary network and firewall changes are in place to make it possible.

Tip

If you are connecting to another computer on the same network segment as the one your computer is on, no firewall configuration is needed other than having Remote Assistance in Windows Firewall enabled.

To connect to the remote computer, you need to know either the ...