Carl Tyler's Blog

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First I must admit I am using RDP less and less, and am using the free service from logmein.com instead, a great service and worth every penny for the free version.  However I still have a few machines which I currently only access with Microsoft Remote Desktop, a couple of those machines have dual monitors (which Logmein does support) but up until recently Remote Desktop didn't.

Vista provided an upgrade to the RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) client to version 6.0. Along with performance enhancements there are a few other neat tricks like 32-bit color and Multi-Head display support. You just need to update to the new client which is available as an optional download from Microsoft Update or you can get it manually here.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/925876 

To use the multi monitor display you simply need to modify your shortcut to the Remote Desktop application to add the ‘/span’ parameter to it. Your RDP session will automatically span your multiple displays on the remote side of the link. The one problem with it is that you lose the concept of monitors when you do this. It’s the equivalent of using a SPANNED desktop on the host computer rather than dual displays. (In dual display mode the Maximize operation will be local to the current monitor not the entire SPANNED desktop.) As a result dialogs will pop up in the middle of the spanned desktop. There are a few tricks to handle this, first you can do it manually by using control-click on two icons in the System Tray, right click, and then use “Tile Horizontally” or alternatively there are a couple of software solutions available

SplitView: http://www.splitview.com/

ZoneSize: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/index.html