RDP-ing to the console session
Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol has a feature that gives it a huge advantage over most traditional remote desktop software such as VNC (UltraVNC, RealVNC etc.): the redirection of sound from the remote to the local machine. That is to say, I would be able to play a music file on the remote computer and have the sound playback from the local computer’s speakers, instead of it being outputted on the speakers of the remote computer.
Typically however, when a RDP connection is established, it creates a new session by default instead of showing what’s display on the remote desktop currently. So although you were logged into the remote computer, you weren’t able to carry on the work you left off previously remotely. This has been the main reason that previously made me use UltraVNC over Microsoft RDP. However, I was ignorant of the fact that Microsoft RDP is able to do the same, until I stumbled across this KB entry. The reason is that this feature is not obvious right out of the box, it’s not shown on the GUI of the client anywhere. It can only be accessed via a command line, with the following command:
mstsc -v:servername /F -console
That’s the best of both worlds in one. I don’t think I’ll ever look back to VNC again, at least not on a Windows system. Maybe when everyone is sporting 10 Gbps LAN connections, we’ll have enough bandwidth to redirect 3D graphics too.