Remote Desktop specify the monitor to open on

Question

Is there any way to make Remote Desktop v6 open on a specific monitor in a dual monitor setup?

I know it supports dual monitors and it is easy to make it use both monitors, but what I really want is for all of my RDP sessions to open on my secondary monitor. I save all of my frequently used connections in .RDP files and currently I have a mish-mash where some open on my primary and other on my secondary monitor.

In browsing through the RDP file I can't discern what setting is controlling this (I suspect it is not in this file).

So, how do I control this? I'm running Win7 as my client by the way, and connecting almost exclusively to Server 2008 R2 machines.

Answer 1

There are screen position and mode options in the RDP file which control this by setting the RDP Client window position and size but there aren't explicit options that specify which monitor, you will have to work with the settings and choose ones that deliver the results you want on your combination of monitors. You can also independently set the remote desktop width and height within the window area you define.

The key settings are

winposstr:s:0,m,l,t,r,b
m = mode ( 1 = use coords for window position, 3 = open as a maximized window )
l = left
t = top
r = right  (ie Window width)
b = bottom (ie Window height)

The l,t coordinates are relative to the standard Windows origin where (0,0) is the upper left of the virtual desktop and the r,b values are absolute width and height so:

winposstr:s:0,1,100,100,800,600

Opens up a 800x600 window 100 pixels in from the left edge of your leftmost monitor and 100 pixels down from the upper edge.

The Screen Mode option tells the TS Client to open in either Windowed or Full Screen mode

screen mode id:i:x

Set x to 1 for Window mode and 2 for the RDP "Full Screen" mode. The TS client will choose the best monitor in the latter mode depending on which physical monitor has the best overlap with the t,l,r,b requirements in the winposstr setting.

The remote desktop size is set by the following two rdp file settings.

desktopwidth:i:x
desktopheight:i:y

Where x and y are the dimensions of the desktop you want in pixels. Obviously if this is larger than the window size you choose you will have scroll bars to deal with and if it's smaller then you will have unused space around the desktop. If you are opting for a Windowed mode then the Window size you choose must be larger than the remote desktop size by some number of pixels that will vary depending on the dpi of your desktop but traditionally this would have been about 6 extra pixels in width and 27 or so in height (for the title bar).

The Remote Desktop Blog has an article on this that you can find here. There is some detailed additional in depth analysis of the interrelationship between these settings in this article on the Ohman Automation Corp website.