What is Remote Desktop?

Created 2001-03-11 by Rainer Gerhards.

All flavors of Windows XP come with integrated terminal services. In the professional version, this feature is called "Remote Desktop". It effectively enables any user logged on to Windows XP to take over his desktop session via a terminal services client. The console (the monitor attached to the PC) is unusable when doing so.

Please note that this does not mean Windows XP Professional will support multiple concurrent users. This is not the case. If a second user tries to connect to a Windows XP Professional machine, the original user session is disconnected. So only a single user can be connected at any given time. However, that single user does not necessarily need to be sitting at the physical machine but can be on any remote machine as long as network connectivity is between them. All that is needed is a standard terminal services (RDP client).