How to Set Up and Use Windows® Remote Desktop Connection
September 18, 2026
September 18, 2026
Turning on Remote Desktop takes about two minutes. Keeping it from becoming your next security incident takes a bit longer.
Remote Desktop Connection is the tool built into Windows that lets you control one PC from another. Your office computer stays at the office. You see its screen, move its mouse, and run its applications from your laptop at home. The software is free, it ships with Windows, and it has worked roughly the same way since 2001.
What changed is everything around it. Microsoft® retired the Microsoft Remote Desktop app from the Store in May 2025, ended support for the standalone Remote Desktop client in March 2026, and pushed cloud users toward a new client with the least searchable name in software history: Windows App.
This guide covers the current setup process on Windows 11 and Windows 10, how to connect from a Mac or phone, and the part most tutorials skip: why you should never expose Remote Desktop directly to the internet.
Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is Microsoft’s client for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). You type in a PC name or IP address, enter credentials, and Windows streams that machine’s desktop to whatever screen you’re sitting in front of. Keyboard and mouse input travel back the other way.
Remote Desktop Connection remains the supported tool for connecting to a physical Windows PC in 2026. That single sentence resolves most of the confusion Microsoft created over the past two years.
Here’s the confusion it created.
Microsoft shipped three different remote desktop clients for years, and it has now retired two of them:
Remote Desktop Connection still handles PC-to-PC access; Windows App covers Microsoft’s cloud services and non-Windows devices.
| Client | Status in 2026 | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe) | Supported, built into Windows | Connecting to a physical Windows PC from Windows |
| Remote Desktop app (Store) | Retired May 2025 | Nothing. Uninstall it. |
| Remote Desktop client (MSI) | Retired March 2026 | Nothing. Replace it. |
| Windows App | Supported | Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, and PC connections from Mac, iOS, and Android |
What this means: if a colleague tells you to “download the Remote Desktop app," they’re giving you 2023 advice. On Windows, search for Remote Desktop Connection instead. It’s already installed.
RDP is the plumbing underneath all of these clients. When you connect, the remote PC renders its desktop, compresses the display output, and streams it to your device. Your keystrokes and mouse movements travel back over the same encrypted channel.
By default, that channel runs over TCP port 3389. Remember that number. It comes up again in the security section, and not in a good way.
The protocol also handles device redirection, which is the feature that makes remote sessions feel local. Your clipboard, printers, and drives can all be mapped into the remote session. Sound plays through your local speakers even though the application producing it runs 40 kilometers away.
One practical note: RDP performance depends on the upload bandwidth of the remote PC’s network, not just your download speed. If your office connection has a weak upload, the session will feel sluggish no matter how fast your home internet is.
Once you’re connected, a few features make the session feel less like a remote PC and more like your own.
If you have two or three screens at your desk, the remote session can use all of them.
The remote desktop now stretches across every monitor, and applications snap to each screen as they would locally. You can also launch it from the Run box with mstsc /multimon.
If you’d rather have one large canvas than separate screens, mstsc /span treats your monitors as a single wide display. That’s useful for spreadsheets and not much else.
On a Mac, open the PC connection’s settings in Windows App and set the display option to use all monitors.
Some Windows shortcuts don’t reach the remote PC because your local computer intercepts them first. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del inside a session and you’ll open your own security screen, not the remote one’s. Remote Desktop has its own equivalents:
| Shortcut | What it does in the remote session |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Alt+End | Opens the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen (lock, sign out, Task Manager) |
| Alt+Page Up / Alt+Page Down | Switches between programs, like Alt+Tab |
| Alt+Home | Opens the Start menu |
| Alt+Insert | Cycles through programs in the order they were opened |
| Ctrl+Alt+Break | Toggles between full screen and windowed mode |
| Ctrl+Alt+Minus (−) | Copies a screenshot of the active remote window |
| Ctrl+Alt+Plus (+) | Copies a screenshot of the entire remote desktop |
In full-screen mode, most standard shortcuts like Alt+Tab and the Windows key pass through to the remote PC by default. If they don’t, check Show Options > Local Resources > Keyboard and set it to apply Windows key combinations on the remote computer.
If you connect to the same PC every day, typing the PC name and adjusting display settings every time gets old fast. Save the configuration as an .rdp file instead.
Double-click the file to connect with those settings. To change them later, right-click the file and select Edit.
A word of caution: .rdp files are a known phishing tool. Attackers have emailed booby-trapped .rdp files that connect victims to attacker-controlled servers and quietly share their drives and clipboard. Only open .rdp files you created yourself or received from your own IT team, and never save a password in a file you plan to share.
You configure the PC you want to connect to, not the one you’re connecting from. Someone needs physical access to that machine once, and after that everything happens remotely.
Three things most guides forget to mention:
On Windows 11:
On Windows 10:
While you’re in power settings, set the PC to never sleep when plugged in. Windows surfaces this option right next to the Remote Desktop toggle for a reason.
Administrator accounts get remote access automatically. For anyone else, select “Remote Desktop users" (Windows 11) or “Select users that can remotely access this PC" (Windows 10), click Add, and enter their username. Skip this step and non-admin users will hit a login error that mentions nothing about permissions, which makes it a miserable thing to troubleshoot over the phone.
Setting up remote access for one PC takes minutes. Doing it for a whole team is a different project. If you’re at the point of enabling Remote Desktop on ten machines and managing who can reach what, our pricing for managed cloud desktops is worth five minutes of your time.
The remote PC is ready. Now for the device in front of you.
Press the Windows key, type “Remote Desktop Connection," and open the app. Enter the PC name you noted earlier, click Connect, and sign in with an account that has access. That’s the whole process on the same network.
Connecting from outside that network is where it gets complicated, and where the security section below becomes mandatory reading.
Download Windows App from the Mac App Store, the App Store, or Google Play. The old Microsoft Remote Desktop apps on these platforms were converted or removed, so Windows App is the current path. Add a PC connection with the PC name or IP address, enter credentials, and connect.
The experience on a tablet is better than you’d expect. On a phone it works, in the sense that a keyhole technically shows you the room.
Here’s the section that should have been in every Remote Desktop tutorial written in the last decade.
To reach your office PC from home without any extra infrastructure, you’d need to forward port 3389 on the office router to that PC. Plenty of guides tell you how. Almost none tell you what happens next: automated scanners find the open port within hours and start hammering it with stolen and guessed credentials around the clock.
The numbers back this up. Sophos found that RDP was involved in 84% of the incident response cases its teams handled in 2024, making it the most abused Microsoft tool, with compromised credentials as the top root cause of attacks at 41% (Sophos Active Adversary Report, 2025). In its 2023 case data, external remote services like RDP were the initial entry point in 65% of breaches (Sophos, 2024).
Exposed RDP is not a theoretical risk. It is one of the most common ways ransomware enters a small business network.
You have three realistic paths for internet-facing remote access:
That third option is the problem we built V2 Cloud around. We’re a managed Desktop as a Service (DaaS) platform, which means we run the infrastructure, the patching, and the secure remote access layer, with multi-factor authentication included and desktops that deploy in under 20 minutes. Your team signs in from any device, and port 3389 on your office router stays exactly where it belongs: closed.
Remote Desktop error messages are famously unhelpful. Here’s what the most common ones usually mean.
This is the catch-all error, and it usually has one of five causes:
If the remote PC runs Windows Home, it will fail with this error every time. Home edition can’t accept incoming connections, as covered in the requirements above.
The PC is reachable, but Windows doesn’t accept your sign-in. The usual culprits:
.\username for a local account.If the error says you need “the right to sign in through Remote Desktop Services," your account isn’t on the allowed list. An administrator needs to add you under Remote Desktop users, as described in the setup section.
Two related errors come up when the two machines disagree about security:
Online forums often suggest turning off Network Level Authentication to make these errors go away. It works, the same way removing your front door fixes a stuck lock. Patch the machines instead.
If troubleshooting remote access is becoming a regular part of your week, the problem may be the setup rather than the settings. With managed cloud desktops, your team signs in from a browser or app, and we handle the patching, updates, and connection layer behind it. It’s built for remote and hybrid teams that need access to work without anyone having to maintain it.
Which brings us to the biggest reason DIY Remote Desktop setups go wrong.
Remote Desktop Connection is the right tool in specific situations. One person reaching one PC, occasionally, ideally over a VPN. It’s free, it’s built in, and for that use case, nothing beats it.
It stops being the right tool when any of these become true:
The pattern behind all three: Remote Desktop Connection remotes into infrastructure you still have to own, power, patch, and secure. Desktop virtualization flips that model, replacing the physical PC with a virtual one that’s backed up daily and covered by a 99.95% uptime SLA. Multiple users can even share a single virtual machine, which is often cheaper than maintaining a desk full of aging towers.
For a deeper look at that model, our guide to remote desktop hosting covers how hosted desktops compare to the DIY approach in cost and management overhead.
If you’ve read this far because securing DIY remote access is turning into a second job, talk to one of our cloud experts. We’ll tell you honestly whether a cloud desktop fits your setup or whether the built-in tools are all you need.
No. Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc.exe) remains built into Windows and fully supported in 2026. Microsoft retired the Microsoft Store Remote Desktop app in May 2025 and the standalone MSI client in March 2026, replacing both with Windows App for its cloud services.
Windows App replaced it. On Windows, Windows App handles Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Dev Box connections. On macOS, iOS, and Android, it also replaced the old Remote Desktop apps for connecting directly to PCs.
Partially. Windows 11 Home can connect out to other computers, but it cannot accept incoming Remote Desktop connections. To make a PC remotely accessible, it needs Windows Pro, Enterprise, or Education.
RDP uses TCP port 3389 by default. Changing the port hides you from casual scans but not from a determined attacker, so treat it as a minor hardening step, never as a substitute for a VPN, gateway, or cloud desktop.
Not directly. Sophos found RDP involved in 84% of the incident response cases it handled in 2024, largely through exposed ports and stolen credentials. Only use RDP over the internet through a VPN, a Remote Desktop Gateway, or a hosted desktop service.
Yes. Install Windows App from the Mac App Store, App Store, or Google Play, add a PC connection with the computer’s name or IP address, and sign in with an authorized account.
RDP connects you to a physical PC you still have to maintain, power, and secure. A cloud desktop replaces that PC with a virtual machine in a data center. With our managed Desktop as a Service platform, we handle the infrastructure, backups, and security layer, and you connect over encrypted HTTPS with no exposed ports.
Press Ctrl+Alt+End. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del inside a session opens the security screen on your own computer, not the remote one.
The most common causes are Remote Desktop being disabled on the remote PC, the PC being asleep, a firewall blocking port 3389, or trying to connect from outside the network without a VPN. PCs running Windows Home also can’t accept incoming connections.
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