Okay, I am a geek. I admit it. I have used a multiple monitor setup for as long as I can remember. As far back as the days when you could run a CGA monitor to execute the program while running he debugger on the monitor monitor attached to a Hercules graphics card. I was spoiled at a very you age with a setup like this.
Since then my setup has only gotten more sophisticated, and I find it daunting not to be able to carry over the multiple monitor setup when I have to access a machine with Remote Desktop. I know there is the check box on the Display tab to “Use all my monitors for the remote session”. What do you do if you only want to use two or three of your attached monitors in the remote session and leave your other monitors out of it.
For example, I have a desktop computer that I use for my personal use that has five or six monitors attached to it. For my day job I have a laptop that when I am in my home office, I would like to remote into rather than maintain a second physical desk with a docking station and multiple monitors.
I could just check the “Use all my monitors for the remote session”, but I like to only use the three main monitors in my setup and leave the others so I can run and monitor non-work related activities. Things like running streaming music or video, monitoring social media, and personal email. Things I do not want run on my employers hardware to help maintain an airgap between the systems.
This can be accomplished by manually editing the configuration file file the remote desktop connection.
From Display settings, here is what my current setup looks like:
I would like to use displays 2, 4, and 3 in my remote desktop session to my work laptop. The first thing to do is to save a remote desktop configuration that you can then edit in notepad or whatever your favorite text editor is. To do this:
- Start the remote desktop
- [Start]Remote Desktop Connection, click open
- Click “Show options”
- Enter the computer name, username, and adjust any of the other setting to your preferences.
- Click “Save As …”
- Navigate to where you would like to store the file, enter a name for the file with an RDP extension and click [Save]
- The monitor numbers in display settings are not the same for the remote desktop client. To list the displays with their identifying number and their coordinates
- [Windows]-R
- mstsc /l
- For my setup this looks like:
Your main display will have the coordinates (0,0). In my case that would be display #4 from display settings, and #3 from the list of monitors from the “MSTSC /L” command I want to use displays 2,4, and 3 which would map to monitors 1,3, and 2.
- Open the remote desktop configuration file that you saved earlier in notepad or your favorite text editor.
- Find the line “selectedmonitors:”, if the line does not exist, add it as the first line of the file
- Add or update the line to include the list of the monitors you would like to use. In my case, the line would look like:
selectedmonitors:s:1,3,2
Save the file.
You can start remote desktop with this new configuration by double clicking on the file, or opening it through the remote desktop client.
Christopher Keslar 