Monday 22 September 2014

Reliable RDP on Windows 8.x

I am falling in love with Windows 8.1 but the Remote Desktop is extremely frustrating; it regularly drops the connection and makes remote administration horrible.

On Windows 7 my remote administration worked but from Windows 8 onwards, it wouldn't. Having a look around it appears that Microsoft has tried to reduce the RDP overhead by allowing UDP packets when the connection allows.

How can we force Windows to revert back to TCP? Well, we can use the Local Policy Editor to do just that.

To open the Local Group Policy Editor from the command line
  • Click Start , type gpedit.msc in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER .

To open the Local Group Policy Editor as an MMC snap-in

  1. Open MMC. (Click Start , click in the Start Search box, type mmc , and then press ENTER .)
  2. On the File menu, click Add/Remove Snap-in .
  3. In the Add or Remove Snap-ins dialog box, click Group Policy Object Editor , and then click Add .
  4. In the Select Group Policy Object dialog box, click Browse .
  5. Click This computer to edit the Local Group Policy object, or click Users to edit Administrator, Non-Administrator, or per-user Local Group Policy objects.
  6. Click Finish .
The policy editor should now be running:


Navigate to 
  • Computer Configuration
  • Administration Templates
  • Windows Components
  • Remote Desktop Services
  • Remote Desktop Connection Client


Enable "Turn Off UDP On Client"

That's it!