Quick Guide to a Lag Free Remote Desktop Experience

With the latest of Microsoft’s line of server operating systems becoming more widely used, there are a lot of new servers being built (or spun up) on Windows Server 2012. One thing you may have noticed, every server with Windows Server 2012 connected to via Remote Desktop Connection (RDP) was displaying a huge amount of lag on the mouse. Doing any kind of task when using RDP was a struggle. Below is a fix we discovered.

The user interface lag is mostly due to the Mouse Pointer Shadow setting on the server being enabled. It seems that turning off this setting for a Remote Connection has been recommended on Windows machines for previous Windows versions, but it also helps in connecting to a Windows Server 2012 machine.

Go into Mouse settings on your server and disable pointer shadow:

Still having trouble with your Remote Connection? You might be able to increase bandwidth by removing some of the cosmetic settings in RDC under “Experience”. Unchecking any of these settings will lower the amount of content that is travelling to your machine, hopefully getting rid of some lag in the process:

Hopefully this has helped you as much as it helped me. I no longer dread having to connect to a Windows Server 2012 machine, in fact I prefer it!



If any questions pop up or if you’d like some extra help reaching these settings, please contact Beringer and we will respond.

Link to article with solution:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/3dcd8f57-3efc-46e9-b2e1-34e61f3ddb3d/remote-desktop-connection-mouse-slow-with-windows-2012?forum=winserver8gen

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