Today I decided to start using Remote Desktop with my new desktop running Vista Home Premium. Unfortunately, I found out that although the Remote Desktop client is supported on all version of Vista, Remote Desktop hosting is only supported on Ultimate and Business versions of Vista. Bummer!
Just when I thought I was out of luck, I found this post by Tony Chan which provides a work-around to use Remote Desktop on Vista Premium. From what I read, the Remote Desktop functionality is available on every version of Windows Vista, but it is just disabled in Home Basic and Home Premium. The fix I found is a hack which allows the Remote Desktop functionality to be accessed.
Before following these next steps, it is important that you create a System Restore point, as this solution involves writing to the registry. Here is how I implemented it.
- I downloaded the hack termsrc.zip here
- I extracted termsrc.zip to a temporary directory
- I allowed my firewall to bypass Port 3389 and also did the same to my router.
- I renamed Windows/system32/termsrv.dll to termsrv.dll.bak
- I ran premium.bat from the extracted zip file.
- I made sure that Terminal Services was connected properly and that it was listening on port 3389 without any errors.
- Bata-bing. Remote Desktop worked! I am very happy with this solution because now I don’t have to upgrade to Vista Ultimate!
Keep in mind that this is not an “official” solution from Microsoft, so there could be some issues with future updates. As of this post, I was using Vista Premium SP1 and everything works great.
Could you explain in more detail how you did all this I have tried and can not get it to work.
What types of problems are you having? If you could give me a little more direction, I would be happy to elaborate.
I can’t get this to work either, the batch file tels me the service is not listening on port 3389.
hi.
im trying to find a way to do the same thing with windows 7. i can only find it for vista. do you think it will work on win7 as well?
thanx