With the advent of this COVID-19 Pandemic, the majority of us are working from home.
This means that we are connecting to even our work machines over the network via Remote Desktop Connection (mstsc).
Given that we are connecting to our physical machines via Remote Desktop, it might have occurred that pressing some of the Keyboard Shortcuts don’t just work right away and they might just get executed on our current machine rather than on the connected machine. An example combination is Ctrl + Alt + Del which would simply show you this screen allowing you to chose some of the options like Lock, Switch user, Sign out, Change a password, Task Manager, or Cancel.
Since the combination will work on most of the Windows System, the user will have to make use of some other combination that could work when using mstsc. However, sometimes in a hurry, we don’t check for the settings available in Remote Desktop Connection for this.
Apply Windows key combinations
When we launch the Remote Desktop Connection, we tend to just enter the value for Computer and click on Connect. This launches the Remote Desktop Connect to the remote computer using the default settings. However, we can modify these with just a few clicks.
Let’s look at the Local Resources tab. This tab has the options for connecting your current machine with the Remote machines audio and also allows you to share the Printers and Clipboards.
One of the option that we see is Keyboard which basically tells us to Apply Windows key combinations:
- On this computer – This basically ensures that the Key combinations are going to execute on your current machine and not on the remote machine.
- On the remote computer – This ensures that the Key combinations are going to execute on the remote machine.
- Only when using the full screen – This does the exact same thing as above except that it will only do that when in full screen.
Let’s try setting the option to On the remote computer and see if it works.
Let us know if it works in the comments below.