Before its final
release, Windows XP's Remote Desktop function had a feature it now lacks: multi-user mode, whereby more than one person
could log on and control the PC at once. When the final version of XP shipped, though, this feature was disabled,
meaning if you log on with remote desktop, any other user must be logged off. Fortunately, there's a way to unlock the
original functionality, but as won't surprise you it's a bit of a hack and definitely at-your-own-risk. The process is
detailed by
Riccardo Raneri in his blog, but basically involves downloading an old pre-release version of termsrv.dll and
making some setting changes. XP still has a hard-coded limit of three simultaneous users, but that's still a lot more
than one.
Tags: hack, multiuser, remotedesktop, tip, tweak, windows
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Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsSusan ReynoldsApr 27th 2006 9:18AM
It's maddening how many roadblocks MS throws in our paths - but probably not surprising. They know that hearing that something is doable but "at your own risk" will scare us.
I and my fellow net-centrics who are savvy enough to _want_ to do work-arounds to make it easier to blog, teach online workshops, or do whatever the app that we need to fidle with enables us to DO, will be:
a.) intimidated into inaction as far as fiddling with "their" system and
b.) thus be unable to do what we want without buying another piece of their overpriced software - hopefully from them because after all it has to work with the piece of horse manure they gave us in the first place.
Arrrgh! See my hair standing on end in frustration?
John DaharshApr 27th 2006 10:41AM
I went to this tutorial a few days ago, and opted to try Sala Source http://sala.pri.ee/terminal-server-patch/ from a suggestion in the comments rather that follow the hack.
Sala source is working great (for 3 days so far), I've upped the RAM on my machine and now two of us are sharing a workstation.
This is a great find - whether you go through the process described in the article or you use something like Sala Source. It's an absolute shame that this is disabled on Windows XP Pro - and a really great find that we can re-enable true "workstation" functionality.
Some small obstacles I had to overcome were enabling fast user switching (Control Panel > User Accounts > Change the way users log on or off > Check "Use the welcome screen" and "Use fast user switching".
The final tiny obstacle is that I always log in using my Administrator account, and when you enable the welcome screen (necessary to enable fast user switching) you don't have the option to log on as administrator. To get the Administrator login, just type ctrl-alt-delete twice and you can log in as Administrator if you need to.