Vista SP1 Changes to Remote Desktop Sessions

A colleague brought up an interesting change in the switches used to establish remote desktop sessions.  In original Vista, if you wanted to fire up a console session on a remote box, you’d create a shortcut with the "/console" switch.

Example:

C:>mstsc.exe /console

This was always quite handy when doing a remote desktop session with the server, only to fine out that two other guys in the department hadn’t logged out properly and were still tying up those two administrative terminal sessions (it had to be the other guys, I ALWAYS remember to log off – well – sometimes…).  Running the command with the "/console" switch would take over the local (console) session and allow you to disconnect the other two sessions.

A quick run of "mstsc.exe /?" on my pre-SP1 box shows the following switches:

However, running the same command on a Vista SP1 box shows that under SP1, the switch has been changed from "/console" to "/admin" as the following screen shot shows.

Apparently this brings the switches inline with the Windows Server 2008 syntax as explained on the Terminal Services Team Blog.  Time to update some shortcuts and *.RDP files to bring them inline with the new syntax…

Doug White