One thing I love about all of the Windows News products is the remote desktop features. I used to use PCAnywhere before, but I find remote desktop to be almost as good now, I’d like to see file transfer like PCAnywhere has, but remote desktop is free, so that’s a plus.

One of the tasks I faced with setting up my network was forwarding ports through my router. There are two issues I ran into when dealing with RDP forwarding. The first was what is the RDP port number. With a quick Google search I found that the standard RDP port is 3389.

Now that you have the port number you can simply go into your router and forward that port and after you enable the remote desktop feature it will work from outside your network as long as you know your IP address or have a dynamic dns service like I do. spent. To enable remote desktop in Windows XP and Windows 2003, go to the start menu, find the my computer icon and right click on it. Select the properties option from the drop down list and then click on the remote tag in the window that appears. There you will see the two checkboxes, check the second box and then click on the remote user button. Make sure the users you want to access are listed, and then click OK until you have exited all windows. RDP is now enabled on your machine.

So this simple setup would have worked for my network, but the problem became that I have multiple servers that I want to access along with my desktop. Now I could just remotely access my desktop and then the other machines from there since they are all on the local network. However, this would create a lot of data to transfer, with limited upstream speeds on your broadband connection, you don’t want this and it will cause performance issues with RDP. So I had two options, I could change the registry entry as stated in the article. I’ll paste that solution here in case that page has a problem at some point:

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WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that arise from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

You can use the Remote Desktop feature in Windows XP Professional to connect to your computer from another remote computer. WARNING: The Windows XP Remote Assistance feature may not work properly if you change the listening port. To change the port that Remote Desktop listens on:

Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).

Look for the following key in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpPortNumber

On the Edit menu, click Modify, click Decimal, type the new port number, and then click OK.
Exit Registry Editor.

NOTE: When you try to connect to this computer using Remote Desktop connection, you must type the new port.

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The other option I had was to go into my router and specify another external port number and then point that port to 3398 at the IP address of the machine I wanted to go to. I chose this second option because it was less time consuming and it worked for me. One attractive thing about the ability to change the RDP port number is security. If you leave the standard port number, anyone will know to check that port to see if you have Remote Desktop enabled and potentially compromise your network. However, please let me know if there are any issues with the registry fix, and if there is, I’ll remove it from this article.