Brighter Fusion Blog

Hi again!

So, you bought a new Vista Home Premium notebook and just tried Remote Desktoping into your old XP Pro SP3 notebook. What? It didn’t work? Are you sure?

Well, no worries. Just try some of these quick ‘n’ easy fixes:

Let’s start by firing up the Remote Desktop program on Vista and pulling down the Computer field — “Browse for more.” Hey, there’s your WORKGROUP work group! Great!

It says the workgroup does not contain any terminal servers.

Yeah, that would be because the default workgroup name for XP is “MSHOME”. Go rename the workgroup on the XP machine to WORKGROUP. Reboot, of course. You’ve got nothing better going on anyway.

Now let’s go back to Vista to make sure it sees the XP machine on the same workgroup. Not there? Maybe that’s because Vista uses a newfangled protocol — Link Layer Topology Discovery or LLTD — to determine who else is on the local network. The problem is only other Vista machines send out that kind of signal.

Not to worry! There’s a patch for XP. Go ahead and try it. Oh, it won’t install? That’s because that patch is for SP2 only. LLTD is already built into SP3…officially.

What? They forgot to include it in there? Then you’re going to need the rumored sixth version of the patch, but Windows doesn’t give that out to just anybody. You have to write them a nice letter asking for it. Or go get it from this guy.

Now try it again. What, it’s still not in there? That’s because XP doesn’t normally advertise that it’s a terminal service. You need to go into the registry and change the value of the TSAdvertise DWORD from 0 to 1. Rebooting again isn’t going to kill you.

Next up, force Vista to stop using it’s newer encryption methods in order to let it talk to older devices on the local net (including Network Attached Storage disks). Try opening the Security Policies editor (secpol.msc) to change the setting. Oh wait! Secpol.msc doesn’t exist on Vista Home Premium, only all the other versions of Vista. Psych! Set LmCompatibilityLevel to 1 in the registry, then.

This would be a good time to deactivate IPv6 and enable network sharing and discovery. Check your node type too.

Now let’s check that local network again. Try pinging XP from Vista. (Don’t forget that Windows Firewall blocks pings by default!)

Pinging times out or resource cannot be found? Turning on RD in the System Properties may have automatically reconfigured your Windows Firewall, so you now have Windows and third-party firewalls running concurrently, causing unpredictable side effects. Go shut off Windows Firewall again, and open up pinging in the third-party firewall.

Please tell me that you can see the XP machine name when you “Browse for more” in the RD client on Vista.

Great! With the simple preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to business.

XP has RDP turned off by default. To start up the host, go into the “Remote” tab under System Properties and hit the checkbox. Assign a user to have RDP access. Oh yeah, something you should know — you can only assign a user which has a password set, so if you need to, take a side trip into XP’s users control panel and set up a new user or add a password to an existing one.

Now you need to configure your firewall to let TCP Port 3389 through on the XP machine. Set up port forwarding as well on the router if you’ll be remoting in from outside your LAN.

So now if you’re lucky at all, it’s working, but when you connect it says that the other computer is unsafe and not to be trusted. Just ignore that and tell it to shut up. You’re golden.

I’m sorry, you wanted it work in the other direction too? Unfortunately, Vista Home Premium doesn’t support Remote Desktop as a host, only as a client, so run, don’t walk, to this page to give Microsoft $150 to upgrade. Or, you can hack that, and concurrent sessions too. Simply download that zip, go find a termsrv.dll file that actually works on 64-bit switch that one for the one that came in the zip, right click and run the premium.bat file as Administrator, click that .reg file, check your termmgr.dll version, and then run through everything in this post again from the top.

Satisfied? Great. If you’re happy, I’m happy. If you’re not happy, Microsoft is happy to recommend a MCSE certified professional who can help you out.

Now go to the rec center for God’s sake. You’ve been working on this stuff for two days straight!