Remote Desktop Connection display settings

In my experience "Remote Desktop" uses the best grahpics res it can on your *local* machine (i.e. the "controlling" machine) and, if possible, the same res your normal desktop runs at, rather than being constrained in any way by the capability of the display hardware in the controlled machine. The only annoying thing about this is when I RD into my main workstation (1280x1024) from my laptop (1024x768) it re-arranges all my desktop icons to fit the 1024 screen - and doesn't put them back again when I log off. :-(

So I dunno why that bit isn't working, I'm afraid.

As to your second question, I have often found this to be very annoying, and when I've followed convoluted tracks into dialogues that people have assured me will lead to a Shutdown or Reboot option, I've failed to find it. And sometimes you *need* to do a shut-down-and-reboot of the remote machine.

So these days I keep a copy of PSTools on every machine I may need to remotely control, and use the "psshutdown" command to initiate the shutdown or reboot I need. It's a doddle, I highly recommend having them handy at all times.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pstools.shtml

Whilst you're at the SysInternals site, check out their other toys, lots of useful stuff there.

When using an RDP connection the graphics card on the remote machine has NOTHING to do with the graphics resolution you see on the initiating machine.

The way that remote sessions work is that you create a session and screenshots are sent back across the wire.  The graphics card in the remote machine does not process the graphics request.  All processing is done by the internal processor then the screen shot is sent across the wire.

You will not be able to modify the display properties of the remote machine as you are not actually using the display adapters on the remote machine.

The display settings on the server are probably limited by default to 16 bit color.  Check here:
Start -> Run -> tscc.msc (Terminal Services Configuration in the Administrators Tools folder).
Right click on RDP-TCP -> Properties
Click the Client Settings Tab
Make sure the Maximum Color Depth is set to 24 bit

You should now get 24 bit color when you connect.

To shutdown or reboot a computer: Windows has a builtin shutdown command.  Check the options by running: shutdown /? at the command prompt.  To reboot a machine you do the following: shutdown -r

There are also group policy settings that you can use to enable the shutdown button on your remote sessions.  If only administrators login remotely that might not be to bad but if users login remotely I STRONGLY suggest that you keep the shutdown button hidden as a user will accidentally shutdown the server.

Hope this helps,

Matt