Can I resize the screen resolution of a remote desktop session?

Question

Is it possible to change the screen resolution of a Windows remote desktop session after I'm already logged on?

For example: it's set for fullscreen but afterwards I want to make the window smaller but now it's Windowed with scrollbars etc. making it a real pain.

Basically what I'm hoping for is like when you resize a VMWare session, the guest OS can resize the resolution and everything works beautifully.

Solution 1

About your only hope is to DISCONNECT the session (leaving it running by closing the RDP session without logging out), and then reconnect using a different resolution. Of course this will all depend on the server remote session settings, etc. This works in 2003/2008. No idea if it will work in 2000. The screen scaling in the VMWare client (and the old McAfeee RDesktop32) was very nice.

mstsc.exe /v server.dns.local /w 800 /h 600

Or something like that, will do it for you. Not really "on the fly" though.

Solution 2

Add the following line to the RDP file (open with notepad):

smart sizing:i:1

Solution 3

No, not until you close that particular remote desktop connection. I think that the reason for this is becasue some older applications retrieve the colordepth and resolution on start and crash when they change suddenly.

Comments

[John Gardeniers]

I see there's a vote to move this to SU but I for one have wanted to do this many times when using RDP to connect to servers, so see it as equally applicable to this site.

[Tarnay Kálmán]

I have a solution for linux. I have created a wrapper around rdesktop which reconnects whenever you resize the window. It feels like resizing a vmware window. github.com/kalmi/rrdesktop

[Tarnay Kálmán]

The Windows 10 client seems to be getting some support for this (or maybe it has been there all along..). Maximizing a full-screen session on a different monitor changes the session's resolution. (Tested while connected to a Windows Server 2012 R2)

[Admin]

OK thanks for confirming my suspicions. This is at least a workaround.

[Glen Blanchard]

This works but it does cause the view to scale.

[Sevin7]

This does not change the remote desktop resolution, it just scales the remote desktop window to remove scroll bars. This results in terrible image distortion in many cases.

[Zeb]

RDCMan is discontinued. The Microsoft Remote Desktop is meant to replace it.

[laktak]

@Konrads IMO RDCMan still works better on Win 10 than the Remote Desktop.

[Zeb]

@iaktak do you have an official download URL?