Remote desktop is slow, laggy, or keeps disconnecting

A remote desktop session streams a picture of a computer in the office to wherever you are sitting. Every keystroke travels there and every screen change travels back, which is why the consistency of your connection matters far more than its headline speed.

Is it you or the server?

Ask a colleague using the same server whether they are also struggling.

• Only you — your connection or your local computer. Continue below.
• Everyone — the server or the office connection. Call us; there is nothing to fix at your end.

Then check your own line. Run Fast.com and click Show more info. Look at latency, not just download speed. Under about 50 ms is comfortable, 50–100 ms is workable, and above 150 ms feels sluggish however fast the download figure is. The Connection Check tool shows how much your latency varies over a few seconds, and variability is what makes typing feel unpredictable.

The changes that help most

Use an ethernet cable. The single biggest improvement available to most home workers. Wireless adds latency and jitter that a remote session exposes immediately.

Reduce the session’s visual quality. In the Remote Desktop Connection window, click Show Options before connecting:

• On the Experience tab, choose Modem (56 kbps) or Low-speed broadband. This disables wallpaper, font smoothing, animations, and themes.
• Untick Persistent bitmap caching only if you are troubleshooting; leave it on normally, it helps.
• On the Display tab, drop the colour depth to High Color (16 bit) and reduce the resolution.

These sound drastic and make an enormous difference. Nobody misses the desktop wallpaper on a remote server.

Use one monitor rather than three. Every extra pixel is data over your home line. If you need multiple screens, expect it to feel heavier.

Close things at home that use bandwidth. Cloud backup, game downloads, other people’s video streaming. Evening congestion on residential broadband is real.

Do not run video calls inside the remote session. Join Teams and Zoom from your local computer, not the remote one — audio and video through a remote session is a poor experience and consumes the bandwidth your session needs.

It keeps disconnecting

1. Check your home Wi-Fi stability first — see VPN won’t connect or keeps dropping, the same causes apply.
2. Stop the laptop sleeping. Settings › System › Power & battery › Screen and sleep, and set a longer timeout while plugged in.
3. Turn off Wi-Fi adapter power saving. Device Manager › Network adapters › your wireless adapter › Properties › Power Management › untick the box.
4. Note whether it happens at a regular interval. Consistent timing points at a session timeout, which is ours to adjust. Irregular drops point at the connection.
5. Reconnect rather than restarting. Your session is usually still there with your work intact. Sign back in and you should land where you left off.

Specific annoyances

Typing lags behind, then catches up in a burst. Classic latency. Wired connection and reduced visual quality are the fixes.

The mouse feels like it is dragging. Same cause, same fixes. Reducing resolution helps noticeably.

Printing from the remote session goes nowhere. Remote printing is fiddly. Often the better route is to save the file to a location you can reach locally and print from your own computer. If you regularly need to print from the session, tell us and we will set it up properly.

Copy and paste between local and remote does not work. Check Show Options › Local Resources › Clipboard is ticked before connecting. Large copies — an entire folder — can fail even when it is enabled.

Sound does not come through. Show Options › Local Resources › Remote audio › Settings › Play on this computer.

A file will not transfer. Under Local Resources › More, tick your local drives so they appear inside the session. Do not use this for large files; use OneDrive or SharePoint instead.

Before you call

Have this ready:

• Your Fast.com results including latency.
• Wired or wireless, and whether you have tried the other.
• Whether colleagues on the same server are affected.
• Whether it is slow constantly or at particular times of day.
• What you are doing when it is worst.

That set of answers usually identifies the cause on the first call.

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Still unusable? Call 440-991-9980 or email [email protected]. If it is affecting several people on the same server, please call — that is a different problem to a single slow home line and we will treat it accordingly.