What are some ways to speed up Windows performance when used over remote desktop? There are already tips on setting the connection options like colour depth and disabling some animations. But here I want to ask about additional tweaks to Windows itself or to common applications, which have the effect of making them more usable over remote desktop.
I'll answer my own question and include a few "todo" parts where there's a setting I would like to change but I don't know or remember how.
I turned off animations generally under Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Performance -> Visual Effects. The only one I left on was 'Show window contents while dragging' (the remote desktop protocol does a reasonable job of optimizing scrolling). Turning off 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' makes some text uglier, but I presume it will make for smaller screen updates to send over the network.
To disable animations in Microsoft Office go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Graphics in the registry and add a DWORD value called DisableAnimations with value 1.
In Firefox I changed new tabs to show a blank tab, and turned off smooth scrolling. Both of these are in the standard preferences window. There are a couple of settings I'd like to change. There is an 'initial paint delay' which is how long Firefox waits after a page starts loading before it starts to render. Over remote desktop I want it to wait a bit longer to avoid unnecessary refresh. This used to be in about:config but the old preference name no longer exits. Anyone know how to change it please? The other thing I'd like is to turn off the animated throbber in the corner of a tab when the tab is loading.
I have Classic Shell installed so I get a Windows 7 style start menu, but this is not to everyone's taste. I found the whizzy new Alt-Tab that shows a thumbnail of each window was too slow over remote desktop. To restore the older Alt-Tab that just shows icons, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer and add a DWORD AltTabSettings with value 1. The thumbnails displayed when hovering over an item in the taskbar were also slow. I turned them off with 7+ Taskbar Tweaker but I suspect the performance settings in Control Panel might equally have worked.
I use PuTTY to ssh to a Linux desktop. (Sadly I can't ssh to it directly, I have to run PuTTY over remote desktop.) The slowest thing was the 'visual bell' where the whole screen flashes. If that happens on the Linux box, it repaints the whole window one text cell at a time. I found that both GNU screen and GNU Emacs were configured to use a visual bell so I turned it off in both. Then PuTTY has its own visual bell you can turn on in preferences. This is much faster over remote desktop than doing it on the Linux side, but I still preferred to turn it off and have a beep sound, or nothing.
In Visual Studio I changed the font from Consolas to Lucida Sans Typewriter (or any other bitmap monospaced font). If you choose Consolas as your font it always gets rendered with font smoothing by VS, disregarding any Windows preferences to turn off font smoothing. Again I believe that the unsmoothed characters will update faster over remote desktop.
