Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am setting my main desktop up so I can use its full power from my laptop. Let’s get started!
While I have remoted into a computer before, this time, I have a deadline for personal reasons. I needed a stable setup that could withstand a reboot or update with minimal intervention. Since the target computer is running Windows 10 Pro, a built-in tool called Remote Desktop Connection looked like the best choice. Oh, I was in for an baaaaad time setting it up.
Things seemed like they were going almost too well at first. For one thing, it looked like the two computers had already played like this in their past, the laptop remembered the name and retained an old password for my specific tower. One problem: Where was the tower?
I must have spent the better part of a day churning over web pages looking for why my laptop couldn’t see my desktop. At one point, it I was convinced the only way to remote in was if you were already at the remote computer. It turns out, (And I’m not fully sure this is how it is, but I’m pretty sure.) the computers behind the router are seemingly not immediately part of a network. Either that or they were both treating it like a public network. My father and I worked on it for about half an hour, while I spent quite a bit of that time telling him what I tried and didn’t work.
We eventually got the two computers to see each other, but things were still not playing nicely together. We ended up checking out the firewall settings based on some of my research earlier in the day. We started flipping switches in Norton’s firewall settings until something worked. After that, we reactivated as much as possible, narrowing it down to the “Norton Smart Firewall” and I even got into some more finely tuned settings to where the smart firewall would let in remote control and, but leave on everything else. Settings (Upper right) > Firewall > General Settings > Smart Firewall > Public Network Exceptions. I enabled “Network Discovery” and “Remote Desktop Connection.”
Sure, at one point, my father had done something to where my laptop could try signing in, and we went down the wrong solution path and I ended up making a new account for my laptop. I was instantly reminded of how much I don’t like how Windows these days is built around the idea that all or most of its users are mostly computer illiterate touch screen users. I know I’m interested in social robotics, but it’s a little uncanny when it comes from an operating system I’ve grown up with.
Things became a lot easier after I managed to get a successful connection, but they weren’t perfect. First of all, my desktop immediately logged out. I was expecting something more along the lines of mirroring screens, but I can live with it this way. Secondly, I wanted to test a restart. The start menu only has a disconnect button now. I had to go back over to the tower and restart it myself. I use a lefty mouse, and both computers knew that. the result, both my computers flipped my mouse buttons, canceling each other out. I’ve unswapped the buttons on my tower.
After some basics were sorted out, I moved my monitors away from my desk and to my temporary setup, where I have my laptop and a more powerful WiFi antenna. I spent a while trying to set both my monitors up and use my laptop as a 3rd monitor, but it doesn’t look like it’s happy with that arrangement. I set my bit monitor to my primary display, and when I say to extend my desktop to my other monitor, it deactivates the laptop screen.
I still need a reinforced mouse pad, but I’m otherwise all set up. Sure, I elevated my laptop body so the screen would line up with the desktop monitors (The whole reason behind the desk is because of the whole battery drama I’ve written about in previous posts), and I would still like to get it working exactly how I want, but that doesn’t seem to be available right now
Final Question: When was the last time you used a driver CD?