In Windows Vista, if you are using the Remote Desktop Connection client to connect to servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-bit (x64), the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections often slows down to a crawl and the screen refreshes at an extremely slow rate. This happens particularly after you have installed the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) x64 release. However, this problem does not occur in the RDP client on XP and the other Windows systems.
Some of the typical symptoms of this problem are:
- long delay for connection to be established to the remote server,
- the remote computer display window on the local PC refreshes very slowly,
- the login screen (after being connected) refreshes slowly,
- following this, all further displays stream slowly, as if network is congested,
- the Remote Desktop Connection is disconnected, requiring you to reestablish the connection.
These problems arise because of the advanced network functions in Vista that try to optimize network transfer speed and utilize the available bandwidth to the full. Hence, the obvious solution is to disable these network settings.
To disable the network tuning functions that affect your RDP connection speed, open an elevated command prompt with administrator rights, and then enter the following commands:
netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
You can also combine the above two commands into single command in the following manner:
netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled autotuninglevel=disabled
Restart the computer after this is done. This time, your RDP connection should be working at good speed.
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