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Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Remote Desktop and OSX

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This blog post is over 18 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

13 Nov 2006

I have an old Windows laptop sitting in a cabinet with a wireless card and power only. I use it for testing things under Windows. For the past few months I’d been using TightVNC as a server on the Windows machine and Chicken of the VNC as a client on my Mac. It was serviceable, but rather slow. Even if I turned colors down to 256 and generally set VNC up with all the normal quick draw options, things were too slow to do anything serious on.

Today, in researching other ways to speed up the VNC connection I came across a Windows Remote Desktop client for OSX. Wow, is it fast. Remote Desktop is almost as quick as using the laptop directly. I’m even running "thousands of colors" and the theme turned on and there’s very little lag at all.

It’s now the only piece of Microsoft software on my Mac.

Of course, this is over my local network. I don’t know how well it would work over the internet, so if that’s what you need to do, your miles may vary. But if you need to remotely view a Windows XP machine from your Mac, give Remote Desktop a try.

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