prophetik music Posted April 13, 2011 Share Posted April 13, 2011 good morning! i've got one question, possibly two, regarding RDP. i run two PCs at my house - one for gaming and online usage, and one for creating and writing music. the first has full network functionality and can access the web at any time. the second computer is blocked at the router from accessing the web, but is connected to my gigabit internal network. both of my monitors (1920x1200 and 1680x1050), my keyboard, and my mouse are connected to my first computer. my high-end monitors (speakers, not displays) and audio interface are connected to the music computer. both are running Windows 7 Professional. i originally wanted to use RDP to connect from my online system to my offline system to allow me to share video and control input information without having to fool with an expensive KVM (KVMs that can pass audio through HDMI are very expensive!), but i've since discovered that you cannot use multiple monitors with RDP unless you have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise on both ends. while i have several licenses for Ultimate, it's not an option to reinstall the OS on my music computer thanks to how long it takes to re-install 75+ VSTs and audio programs and their respective security devices. it took me three days the first time through =) so, my first question is, is there a registry hack or other workaround that allows RDP to use multiple monitors at varied resolutions in Windows 7 Professional? i should note that i've tried several alternate solutions - RealVNC, UltraVNC, and Teamviewer are a few - but none have the smooth, instantaneous feel that RDP has, as well as the support for 1920x1200 video. UltraVNC was very choppy even at 256 colors...over a gigabit network that has been tested up to 120MB/s transfer rates between computers. didn't make much sense. i can stream a 1080p heavily encoded and compressed movie over the network, but not a 1680x1050 screen? in the event that this isn't possible, i need to know if it's possible to upgrade Windows 7 Professional to Ultimate without losing any of my programs and installations...over an RDP connection. the music computer currently doesn't have monitors or input devices hooked up to it, as it's in a rackmount. it also doesn't even have a DVD drive on it, and i don't really want to bother hooking one up for something that should be this simple. every time i try, it kicks back an error almost immediately, before i've even chosen to upgrade or not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djpretzel Posted April 13, 2011 Share Posted April 13, 2011 I don't think a registry hack would do it, and I haven't seen one... What about using the /span option? I know it's not as good, but perhaps it may work? I'm a big fan of RDP but you're trying to lean on it a little too hard if you're using it for heavy audio/video/multimedia work, imo. As far as the upgrade, it shouldn't wipe out programs, but you may very well need a keyboard & monitor; RDP wasn't intended for use during OS upgrades since they often kick back out to the shell anyways, or disable services that RDP rely on, in order to complete. I'd wager that the time it takes to hook up a monitor & keyboard is probably nominal next to the time you'll take trying to figure out how to do it over RDP, if it's possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted April 13, 2011 Author Share Posted April 13, 2011 /span and /multimon only work with Ultimate or Enterprise. the issue is i'd have to upgrade both computers, and i've got one Ultimate license that isn't being used elsewhere in the house. that means that i'm technically going outside the terms of service, and i'd prefer to keep my OSes legitimate. the alternative is taking Ultimate off of one of my other systems and putting Pro on there, and then using that key, but it'll take forever to do that and i just don't want to deal with it. the thing is, i'm not leaning on it too hard at all. i'm only using it for sharing monitors and a keyboard/mouse - all the processing is being done on the other computer. when i worked at MS's tech support office, we shared multiple 1920x1200 monitors on a daily basis over the Internet and i got better performance than i'm getting on local gigabit. doesn't make sense, and i'm still digging to figure out why. i might as well just swap a monitor and dvd drive and do the upgrade itself on the music system. i've never used W7's upgrade service, just XP, so i'm not really sure what to expect. i know it's possible to upgrade over a PXE boot, so i wasn't sure if it was doable over RDP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Late Mistakes Posted April 13, 2011 Share Posted April 13, 2011 My personal opinion would be you should just upgrade them both to ultimate and downgrade your other. It may take some time and a bit of effort, but it fixes your problem from then on. I guess until windows 8 if you bother to upgrade to that in a year. The upgrade from reading shouldn't affect your files, but you should still be careful and have backups. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophetik music Posted April 13, 2011 Author Share Posted April 13, 2011 i think i might have to =( i was hoping to avoid that. oh well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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