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Remote Desktop and OSX

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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.

Jakob S
November 13, 2006 11:37 PM

Remote Desktop Connection works really well over the Internet as well. I use it, both from OS X and Windows, to remotely manage our Windows servers and it really does feel like sitting at the remote machine.

Joseph Scott
November 14, 2006 11:23 AM

I've been using Chicken of the VNC for awhile. It isn't that great, but usually good enough to get small quick tasks done. What I'd really like to see is a high quality VNC client for Mac OS X. Remote Desktop isn't always as good a solution as VNC.

Bill Brown
November 14, 2006 12:13 PM

I work from home every week using Remote Desktop and Cisco VPN to do ASP.NET web development on my iMac. It's a little surreal.

Arvind Aggarwal
December 26, 2006 9:06 PM

I am using RDC t access my Windows XP. Two problems. The colours appear strange, almost bleeding. And the window cannot be resized. Any feedback to fix that? Thanks Arvind

Arvind Aggarwal
December 26, 2006 9:11 PM

Hi, Sorry about my earlier post. I figured out that if I really read all the options it works. Arvind

This discussion has been closed.

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